Urban Spaces Get an AI Makeover
Source: Route Fifty By Kaitlyn Levinson, Assistant Editor, GCN
The Dall-E artificial intelligence system is helping redesign city streets, replacing car-centric roads with walkable boulevards and bike lanes.
Prospect Park sits just four miles away from one artist’s Bushwick apartment in Brooklyn, New York, but with no safe bike lane to get there, Zach Katz has to spend nearly an hour on the bus or subway to get there. Imagining a more walkable New York, he digitally redesigned the busy city streets to create an urban environment that puts pedestrians and cyclists first.
Katz, a 28-year-old artist and urban design advocate, is leading Transform Your City, a team of activists, planners, developers and researchers that uses Dall-E artificial intelligence to reimagine cities with more open spaces such as parks, car-free boulevards and bike lanes.
Digital recreations make it easier for city planners to envision potential projects that could ultimately facilitate safer street conditions, Zach said during the Route Fifty Future Cities summit. Dall-E is a machine learning model developed by research lab OpenAI that can produce realistic cityscapes from text and image prompts. While renditions may not look as realistic as professional designs, the rapid pace of AI advances may enable Dall-E to catch up to professional planners, he said.
Dall-E can realize an image in 20 minutes for a dollar or two, reducing the cost and time it would take for staff to do the same job, Katz said in an email. Officials from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and New York have requested AI transformations of city streets, he said.
“What would it look like if it were safe for a child to bike to the grocery store?” Katz said. “It’s hard to imagine this kind of total transformation, so the AI renditions are really helpful for that.”