Towards an Infrastructure for Urban Superorganisms: Challenges and Architecture

Future urban computing scenarios will be characterized by the close integration of ICT devices and humans. Citizens, by using their own capabilities augmented and integrated with ICT technologies, could thus collaboratively realize a sort of socio-technical super organism to support high-levels of collective "urban" intelligence and various forms of collective actions. This position paper, also with the help of a representative case study, identifies the key engineering challenges for future urban super organisms and proposes a two-tier architecture for the infrastructure to support the activities of novel urban super organisms.