Artificial Intelligence for a sustainable future urban development

The paper explores how innovative Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are leading to new urban planning methods based on the interplay between human creative thinking and the computational power of modern computers (Figure 1). The goal of the new planning tools is to plan cities more efficient and, despite their complexity, more comprehensible, and - with the help of the computer - to understand the parallel interactions of many different factors in order to develop urban qualities. The flexibility of the computer programs also makes it possible to integrate a wide variety of stakeholders in planning processes and thereby respond to people´s needs.