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Art, AI, and community in evolving public space
City Science at the MIT Media Lab and Raúl Díaz-Obregón, Profesor Contratado Doctor at ETSIDI (UPM), are developing a new research and design initiative on the intersection of art, AI, and public space. The project explores how cities can become more human-centered and more responsive to care, presence, memory, and collective experience.
Rather than treating the city only as a system of measurable data, this work studies how urban space can also reflect emotional, bodily, and social realities. The project investigates light, humidity, heat, growth, trace, and time as urban signals, using artistic interventions to make invisible dynamics visible in public space.
This initiative begins with a simple question: How can urban intelligence better include care, memory, and human presence? The project explores this question by combining art as a tool for connection and reflection, AI as an interpretive layer that supports people rather than replacing them, and public space as a living environment continuously shaped by community interaction.
Possible interventions include living public installations such as Gardens of Abandonment, where growth depends on community care and makes collective responsibility visible in the city itself. Others imagine a Breathing Wall, a responsive urban surface that reacts to breath, humidity, and proximity, revealing changing patterns of encounter, density, and shared presence as if the city were a living organism. The project also explores forms of Environmental Projection, in which light and visual atmospheres emerge from movement, interaction, and rhythm, helping people sense urban dynamics that often remain invisible. Alongside these, the idea of a Living Archive proposes a growing material memory of public space, where each piece captures hours, days, or weeks of urban life and becomes part of an evolving record of social change, intensity, and use.
This project expands the idea of the smart city. It proposes a more human model of urban intelligence—one that includes emotion, interpretation, vulnerability, and care. Through artistic and material interventions, the city becomes not only measurable, but also legible as a shared social and emotional environment.
Led by:
Raúl Díaz-Obregón, Profesor Contratado Doctor, ETSIDI, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid