AI Applications in Urban Planning

For ten thousand years, cities have been deaf. They could not feel the pipe about to burst, hear the bridge beginning to fail, or sense the danger forming beneath the street. That has changed.

The definitive guide to AI's transformation of urban planning. Drawing on real deployments from Singapore to Barcelona, Helsinki to Medellín, it moves beyond the hype to show what artificial intelligence is genuinely doing in cities today (easing congestion, predicting infrastructure failure, accelerating disaster response) and what it cannot, and must not, be allowed to do alone.

It confronts the hard questions of surveillance, algorithmic bias, data sovereignty and equity, and looks ahead to AI-driven data centres, a working city imagined in 2045, and a new professional identity for the planner. The intelligent city is not a destination that technology delivers; it is the cumulative residue of decisions being made, right now, by people like you.