The growing influence of AI in urban design, paired with rising expectations around speed and cost, raises critical questions about the design process. Generative AI offers new creative and analytical capabilities, but often lack transparency or contextual sensitivity, risking outcomes that are visually compelling yet impractical or ungrounded. Drawing on Arup's internal research, live projects, and academic partnerships, this paper explores how AI is reshaping urban design workflows - and where human judgement remains essential. It argues for thoughtful use: preserving core design values while using AI to question and refine briefs and catalyse technical exploration.
This paper addresses the design of Britain's proposed new generation of 'new towns', asking how can we design the flourishing communities of the future? Structured around nine thematic inquiry areas, it combines historical and policy contextualization with a qualitative synthesis of written and oral testimony submitted to the Parliamentary inquiry, New Towns: Creating Communities. Findings are distilled into nine consensus statements, emphasizing context-sensitive design, purposeful innovation, long-term value, resilience, nature-led planning, early social infrastructure, health-led placemaking, inclusivity, and robust design governance. The paper reframes new towns as long-term, integrated civic projects that should be grounded in evidence-led, human-centred design principles.
Today, urban design faces evermore complex, serious challenges and increasing uncertainty in cities, driven by planetary urbanization, socio-economic disparities, and the climate crisis. Computational approaches - AI-aided modelling, analytics, simulation - have the potential to support urban planners in managing this complexity and exploring diverse possible futures. The paper explores four thesis projects examining data-driven pipelines for planners working within unstable environmental conditions, leveraging computer vision and remote sensing to deepen our understanding of socio-spatial realities. This offers a holistic view of how computation can support planning practices by embracing a multiplicity of perspectives as a condition of contemporary urbanization.
Str & aring;k is a Swedish urban design concept defined as an inter-scalar urban corridor, developed over the past two decades to support inter-urban and urban-rural connections. Based on interviews with twenty planners in three southern Swedish municipalities, their drawings of str & aring;k, and QGIS income analysis, the article shows that few str & aring;k cross the urban-rural divide; instead, boundaries form at urban fringes while str & aring;k contributed to porous borders within cities. The str & aring;k concept has shifted towards greener designs, with trees and green spaces replacing parks and urban nature. Overall, planning increasingly embraces green, place-based connectivity through str & aring;k.
This paper examines how deregulated planning, particularly Permitted Development Rights (PDR), has reshaped residential and urban morphologies in London through incremental adaptations. Using morphological and visual analysis across two contrasting London districts, the study documents how small-scale extensions - rear, side, and rooftop - accumulate over time to generate new hybrid typologies. While intended to remain invisible, these interventions produce a form of morphological informalisation within a formally regulated context. The findings reveal how soft densification transforms dwelling types, block structures, and visibility in the cityscape, highlighting the role of residents as co-producers of urban form.
This paper analyses the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of three distinct urban arenas: greenfields (new suburban developments), brownfields (post-industrial sites with compact development around transit), and greyfields (middle-ring suburbs with low-rise infill), in the sprawling city of Perth, Western Australia. Analysis of the 50-year emissions reveals that the greyfield case study, composed mostly of single-level detached and attached dwellings, has the lowest emis-sions, slightly lower than the brownfield case study, which comprises mostly apartments, indicating that density is not the sole predictor of emissions. Nonetheless, the greenfield case studies have much higher GHG emissions, particularly influenced by house size.
This paper advances a more nuanced understanding of the inefficient use of buildings and spaces, drawing on the context of Ireland. Firstly, it examines the persistent lack of reliable vacancy data through qualitative research involving interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders. Secondly, it argues that conceptualizing vacancy as a spatial dimension of adaptive capacity can better inform policy and support sustainable development. Finally, the paper introduces a flexible, attribute-based vacancy taxonomy aligned with the adaptive cycle of the building.
The study examines the relationship between street vitality and street safety, addressing the potential tension between the two and testing the validity of machine-learning derived streetscape scores in a European context against local experience. Three datasets are integrated: Mapillary street-view images processed with a pre-trained model, site-specific photographs analysed using the same algorithm, and 311 resident survey responses evaluating walking comfort as an indicator of street vitality. Non-parametric tests demonstrate significant associations between walking comfort and perceived safety, while demographic covariates show no statistically significant effects in the survey.
Cedric Price (1934-2003) frequently expressed the notion of 'leisure' in his projects. This paper traces the precedents encompassing leisure, or a phenomenon to be experienced in the 'short-life toys' of dimensions and organization, through an exhibition organized at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montr & eacute;al, in 1999-2000 as the 'Mean Time'. By approaching two of fourteen categories in which the items on display were divided - Suspending Time and Uncertainty - this paper case studies Vauxhall Gardens (1661-1859) and Abu Dhabi Sea Garden (1973) to understand how leisure manifests itself in Price's work.
This research explores how people wayfind in urban public spaces in relation to physical and perceptual challenges. An eye-tracking field study, with retrospective interviews, was conducted at two waterfront public spaces in Brisbane, Australia, with two participant groups: those using assistive mobility devices and those able to walk without assistance. Findings suggest that person-environment interactions experienced while navigating the sites differed substantially between participant groups, highlighting issues of experiential usability rather than objective accessibility standards. This research underscores the importance of wayfinding, accessibility, and usability as interconnected dimensions of public-space experience that can impact users' lived experience in urban environments.
This paper examines how sustainability principles shape contemporary urban development in Lule & aring;, Sweden, an Arctic city undergoing industrial transition, and how current planning practices diverge from modernist approaches of the 1960s-70s. Drawing on spatial analysis, planning documents, and five neighbourhood cases, it traces design and residential changes across three growth periods. The study addresses a research gap by showing how sustainability transitions materialize spatially. The results reveal a shift towards denser, more heterogeneous, and ecologically integrated urban design. Such approaches mirror recent developments in other Arctic cities, foregrounding compactness, energy efficiency, and improved quality of life through urban design.
Urban renewal reshapes cities, raising tensions between development and skyline heritage. Although the view management policies have been widely applied, their effectiveness remains unverified. This paper develops a dual-tier assessment framework to evaluate skyline-protection policies using crowdsourced street-level imagery. Through a longitudinal analysis on London View Management Framework (LVMF), findings reveal a gap between regulatory compliance and protection outcomes. While LVMF prevents acute harms, such as landmark obstruction, it allows chronic erosion through cumulative compliant development. Protected viewpoints gain middle-ground mass, lose landmark prominence, and show weaker compositional coherence, implying geometry-based rules can miss aesthetic and symbolic loss in practice.
This paper examines how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being integrated into urban design practice and its future impact. Despite its transformative potential for built environment disciplines, little is known about AI's use in urban design. Based on interviews with UK practitioners, the study explores AI applications in urban design work, and implications on workflows and professional roles. Findings show considerable experimentation with AI but limited influence on actual design. AI integration seems inevitable, but current tools have significant limitations. Judgement, contextual understanding, and personal engagement emerge as essential human contributions to address complex urban design challenges in an AI-augmented practice.
Urban design must reconcile spatial complexity with accessibility and resilience, particularly in constrained island contexts. This study integrates space syntax and fractal analysis to examine three Sardinian cities: Sassari, Olbia, and Cagliari. Findings reveal contrasting urban logics - Sassari's integrated but monocentric core, Olbia's dispersed heterogeneity with potential for polycentric growth, and Cagliari's compact yet fragmented structure shaped by heritage and topography. These patterns highlight design priorities: strengthening peripheral networks, linking dispersed sub-centres, and reconciling conservation with connectivity. Beyond Sardinia, the study demonstrates how combined configurational and fractal diagnostics provide transferable tools for designing legible, walkable, and resilient urban environments.
