Intelligent Megalopolises

This white paper defines the category of Intelligent Megalopolis as a city of more than ten million inhabitants whose daily operation depends, structurally rather than ornamentally, on agentic infrastructure layers embedded in mobility, energy, public safety, health and public administration. Four constitutive pillars are proposed —sensoric infrastructure, public agents, algorithmic governance, and augmented citizenship— and the current state of adoption is analysed for the five relevant Latin American megalopolises: Mexico City, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Lima and Bogotá, in contrast with global references such as Singapore and Dubai. The paper articulates implications specific to Latin America, identifies the risks of an ungoverned agentic urbanisation and proposes a regional regulatory framework designed to prevent the reproduction, at metropolitan scale, of the asymmetries the region already faces in other layers of digitisation.