Federico Cugurullo (2021): Frankenstein Urbanism: Eco, Smart and Autonomous Cities, Artificial Intelligence and the End of the City

Federico Cugurullo’s Frankenstein Urbanism: Eco, Smart and Autonomous Cities, Artificial Intelligence and the End of the City is a bold and enticing book, offering a journey across historical ideas and empirical realities that concern some contemporary urban experiments. It also suggests what may lay ahead, depending on which path we choose to follow. The author focuses primarily on the eco-city, secondarily on the smart city and thirdly, on the autonomous city, the last agenda referring especially to the trend of embedding artificial intelligence systems in cities. At first glance the title of the book feels a bit odd and obviously, has a sinister tone—why has the classic monster created by Mary Shelley been dug up and brought into the context of urban studies? Nevertheless, after reading the book, the idea of using Shelley’s powerful narrative and Victor Frankenstein’s experiment as a metaphor/analogue for experimental urbanism is brilliant, for reasons explained below.