A lower bar couldn’t be picked…
Most cases bad city design isn't even caused by bad design, but lack of design, or the influence of political goals interfering in the process and making it shit, or planners having to design around antiquated or otherwise non functional parts of the city and making the outcome less than ideal in the process. if one gave a decent human city planner free reign to do whatever they wished with a blank slate new city they would do good job .
The limits of urban design have next to nothing to do with actual ability. It's the fact that you have to deal with actual people, who very often will loudly disapprove of anything that might even slightly inconvenience them no matter how much net benefit it brings.
Everyone with half a brain knows that, for instance, you probably shouldn't need a permit from the city of San Francisco to verify that your new windows won't excessively disrupt "neighborhood character", or that a defunct laundromat should not be a protected historical landmark (which was of course only designated as such after a proposed housing development on the land), or that a truck depot in Harlem is not a better use of the land than a housing complex that would be 50% subsidized.
All of those are real examples, by the way. This isn't a technological or skill problem. It's a people problem, and the robots aren't going to save us there.
Thank you for posting this. These kind of articles infuriate me. A 10 year old playing Sim City can 'design' a better city than anything we currently have. When the "AI" (AI does not exist) actually fucking builds one that works better, I'll be interested in an article like this. So, never.
Tragic that the only people who manage to buck that trend are racist lunatics like Robert Moses or totalitarian regimes like China.
I'm sure it could avoid the worst of climate change too. The problems in these areas aren't really that we don't know the correct answers, it's that we don't have the political will to do what needs to be done.
The far right has already branded 15 minute cities as a communist plot, imagine how they would respond to a Chinese-originated ML city design tool.
Moat of the problems from climate change involving cities are people ignoring known risks, like building in flood plains. Yeah, the AI will identify the same things as the city planners and insurance companies identified decades ago and people have been ignoring ever since.
Based on our current civilization I beg to differ.
If its not 3x3 squares in blue, green, and yellow then I don't want to know.
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