Urban Intelligence Infrastructures: Epistemic Foundations and Governance Frameworks for AI‐Mediated Environmental Sustainability Equity in the Polycentric City

The pervasive embedding of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in urban infrastructures (producing embedded, socio‐technical systems that intermediate knowledge, agency, and material flows) poses substantial challenges to accountability, equity, and ecological sustainability. This theoretical article argues that existing governance architectures are ill‐equipped to address the epistemic risks (e.g., algorithmic opacity, embedded biases, marginalization of local knowledges) inherent in such AI‐intermediated urban systems. We build a polycentric governance framework grounded in the principles of epistemic justice by design, environmental sustainability as the primary objective, polycentric accountability, infrastructural public ownership and stewardship, and anticipatory governance reflexivity. This architecture is proposed to assist urban designers, policymakers, and other stakeholders in steering the embedding of AI towards health equity‐enabling and environmentally sustainability‐enabling outcomes.