The impact of Generative AI in urban design and planning practice: assessing tools, tasks, skills and pedagogical challenges
Lead institution: University College London
Country: United Kingdom
Project primary contact: Juliana Martins (Juliana Martins), Associate Professor (Teaching)
Secondary contact: This project is a collaboration between UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning and Arup.
Arup:
Kathryn Firth, Director of Masterplanning & Urban Design
Pei-Chin Lin, Designer
UCL:
Robbie Macaulay, Faculty Learning Technology Lead for the Bartlett Faculty
Bahar Durmaz-Drinkwater, Research Assistant
Project Title: The impact of Generative AI in urban design and planning practice: assessing tools, tasks, skills and pedagogical challenges
The project is: In progress
Project Summary:
The recent expansion of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to change the way we work in a range of industries.
In particular, these tools will likely have a significant impact on how we design and plan cities. These disciplines deal with complex and multidisciplinary urban problems, and already use a range of digital tools for processing and mapping data, design generation and optimization, etc.
Yet, there is limited understanding of how Generative AI tools will impact and be integrated into design/plan-making processes, and which skills will be required by professionals to work with AI.
Through a collaboration between the Bartlett School of Planning and the Integrated City Planning Team at Arup, funded by UCL’s HEIF Knowledge Exchange and Innovation Fund, this project aims to co-produce an understanding of the role and use of emergent AI tools in urban design and planning practice, and the pedagogical responses required to educate professionals that can make use of these tools in an effective and ethical manner.
Impact: This project will provide a toolkit to support the use of AI tools in work processes underpinning urban design and planning practice and boost the development of innovative pedagogical responses to the emergence of AI in these fields.
Audience: UCL, ARUP, and other urban design/planning practices and organizations.
This output is part of a member project - AI Garage: Creating the Future Now which collects and curates cutting-edge practice examples of AI. You can explore other submissions here.