We developed a detailed digital twin model of Versailles Rive Droite station to analyze passenger flows, identify congestion points, and improve urban infrastructure accessibility and efficiency. This project demonstrates how data-driven AI methods can support better planning and design for public space and mobility. 

This paper critically examines the hypothesis that artificial intelligence (AI) could become a contemporary form of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” in sustainable urban governance. Drawing on debates on the smart city, environmental justice, and critiques of technological solutionism, it analyzes how AI applications optimize urban flows but simultaneously risk reinforcing social, informational, and ecological asymmetries. The main argument is that AI does not spontaneously generate sustainability: it reflects the power structures that shape its deployment. The essay finally outlines the conditions for an emancipatory digital governance based on transparency, citizen participation, and infrastructural sobriety.

This paper examines how systems thinking helps to better understand the challenges and opportunities of urban climate change mitigation and adaptation. Rather than treating climate risks as isolated technical problems, it approaches cities as socio-ecological systems shaped by interactions between infrastructure, materials, governance structures and everyday practices. Through this lens, recurrent failures of urban climate policies appear not as a lack of solutions, but as the result of structural misalignments within urban systems. The argument is explored through a comparative analysis of two contrasting cases: Hassan Fathy’s New Gourna project in Egypt based on ancient Nubian architecture and contemporary flooding in Dakar, Senegal. New Gourna illustrates an integrated approach in which housing functions as a climatic infrastructure, combining passive design, local materials and knowledge transfer to simultaneously address mitigation and adaptation. However, the project’s partial failure highlights the importance of social and institutional appropriation in sustaining environmental performance. Dakar, by contrast, demonstrates how fragmented interventions and downstream infrastructure responses can generate maladaptation, redistributing risk along existing socio-spatial inequalities despite significant investment.

By comparing these cases, the essay identifies transferable systemic principles: upstream integration of climate constraints into urban form, alignment between infrastructure and social practices, and the central role of maintenance and governance capacity over time. It concludes that effective urban climate action depends less on technological sophistication than on transforming relationships within the urban system. Systems thinking therefore serves not only as an analytical framework but as a guide to identifying leverage points capable of producing durable and socially equitable climate resilience.

King’s Cross NXT proposes transforming King’s Cross into an adaptive, inclusive, and climate-resilient urban system.

The project responds to global challenges: climate volatility, gentrification, social fragmentation, AI-driven change, and distrust in privatized public spaces, now visible in the district.

Key proposals include green corridors, blue-green canal spaces, bioclimatic design, a mobility hub, micro-offices, and a strong community focus. A central feature is multisensory wayfinding for people with disabilities, integrating tactile, audio, and visual systems to ensure accessibility.

The strategy is supported by mixed funding sources (developer contributions, CSR partnerships, CIL, operators, service charges).

Overall, the project repositions King’s Cross as a resilient and inclusive urban ecosystem, ready for its next evolution.