ABSTRACT
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are coming. This is happening particularly in cities where AVs are being increasingly employed as devices for land transport, which are fully driven by artificial intelligence (AI). AVs are emerging largely as a matter of transportation with a focus on logistics. Their dominant role and function appear to be about moving someone or something from A to B. The mainstream narrative pictures autonomous vehicles primarily as transport technologies that simply move things and people in space. In this chapter, we critically discuss the dimensions of the AV that exceed its transportation role. We do so by adopting an urbanistic perspective, in an attempt to show how what is generally portrayed as a simple vehicle is in reality a potent driver of urban change whose actual impact and repercussions can be properly understood only within the field of urbanism. We argue that the AV stands, conceptually and empirically, at the conjunction of two themes, vehicles and AI, and draw on complementary strands of literature in urban studies, to unpack the three main urban dimensions of AVs, which go beyond solely transportation: data, design and environmental impact.
