This doctoral thesis examines the contested production of urban artificial intelligence and robotics (UAIRs) as a co-constitutive process shaped by multi-scalar power negotiations among municipal interest group coalitions, transnational capital, geopolitical forces, and China’s central party-state. Through an in-depth qualitative case study of Shanghai’s UAIR practices, this research reveals how cities – particularly those of political-economic significance – are increasingly functioning as strategic frontiers for AI territorialisation, a phenomenon inadequately theorised in existing urban scholarship.
The study advances a relational, contextualised political economy framework to analyse two interlinked dynamics mediated through local structurally-oriented strategic actors: (1) how local coalitions perform technological sovereignty through demonstrative UAIR projects while accommodating global capital flows, and (2) how they reconcile national AI strategies with locally adapted implementation within multi-layered entrustment governance structures. Empirical analysis uncovers significant discrepancies between Shanghai’s AI policy imaginaries and their material outcomes, reflecting the constitutive tensions arising from multi-scalar power negotiations beyond urban boundaries. The findings yield three key conclusions:
1. UAIRs as multi-scalar co-production: UAIR production transcends urban and national territorial boundaries, being co-produced through the strategic navigation of competing political-economic regimes and diverse stakeholder interests.
2. UAIRs as a vision-material disjuncture: The significant gap between Shanghai’s AI imaginaries and their materialisation should not be ascribed merely to planning or implementation failures. Instead, it stems from a techno-utilitarian governance model operating through a multi-layered entrustment structure, which prioritises political legibility, geopolitical competition, and commercial opportunism over genuine urban needs.
3. Shanghai as an epitome of the re-territorialising strategic AI frontier: The Shanghai case epitomises the emergence of a new urban form wherein state strategic rescaling reconstitutes urban governance, thereby positioning the city as a strategic frontier in response to escalating geopolitical competition.
The thesis makes three primary contributions. Empirically, it provides one of the first systematic analyses of UAIR production within China’s urban political economy, offering crucial insights into a globally significant yet under-theorised context. Methodologically, the strategic relational framework developed in this thesis addresses the ahistorical and de-contextualised limitations in literature, capturing the co-constitutive interplay of discourse, materiality, and multi-scalar power within UAIR assemblage. Theoretically, this thesis pioneers a paradigm shift by reconceptualising the ‘experimental AI city’ as a performative enclave, and retheorising the ‘global AI city’ as a re-territorialising strategic frontier in the post-neoliberal geopolitical economy of AI.
By foregrounding the dynamics of strategic agency and structurally selective contexts, this research demonstrates the inadequacy of existing urban (global) AI frameworks in accounting for geopolitically contested AI urbanism. This study calls for relational, contextually grounded approaches to unpack the co-production of technology, multi-scalar power, and urban space. The thesis thus offers a critical conceptual toolkit for understanding urban technological transformation in a rapidly evolving global political-economic order.
