Animal-Centered Urban Planning Frameworks for Improving Human-Wildlife Coexistence in Smart Cities

Abstract

Urbanization, especially rapid urbanization, has brought new problems of habitat fragmentation and increased human–wildlife interaction which poses ecological, environmental and socio-economic challenges to the modern smart cities. Traditional planning processes tend to focus on infrastructure and economic development while paying little attention to conservation of biodiversity and wildlife habitat needs, and can ultimately lead to a loss of ecological connectivity and increasing human–wildlife conflict. To foster sustainable human-wildlife coexistence, this study suggests an Animal-Centered Urban Planning Framework that brings together the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing, digital twins and participatory governance. The framework will comprise several functional layers, such as data collection, monitoring of wildlife, AI-based spatial analysis, conflict prediction and policy integration, allowing for real-time assessment of ecosystems and data-driven informed urban planning. Ecological, environmental and technological indicators include biodiversity conservation, habitat connectivity, conflict reduction, decision-support capability and sustainability performance, whilst social indicators include sustainability performance. Comparative analysis shows that the proposed framework delivers significantly better performance compared to conventional urban planning, with 91% of biodiversity conserved, 89% of the habitat connected, 90% of reduction of human–wildlife conflict, 95% of intelligent decision support capability, and 94% of the overall sustainability performance. The results show that the combination of ecological intelligence and smart city technologies has a great effect on increasing biodiversity management in urban areas and decreasing ecological risks. The proposed framework offers a flexible and scalable approach to building smart cities, resilient, and inclusive to wildlife in accordance with global sustainability objectives.