AI Comes to Urban Planning, With Mixed Results

Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. At the end of the week, we take some of the most popular stories and share them with Urban Milwaukee readers. They are national (or international) links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful.

AirBnB feels different now: When the short term rental company AirBnB started it was a way to create a personalized travel experience with local hosts and a good experience. But now it’s moved towards something else, a big business with hosts that buy houses just to rent out like hotel rooms. 30 percent of listings are by people or companies that own 21 properties or more, and while you can still get a place to stay for cheap, the host of other issues gets bigger. (Kate Lindsay | The Atlantic)

Changing geography of work from home: While there’s a perception that work from home is leading to people moving to rural areas and open spaces, most work from home is being done in large metropolitan areas where there were already a lot of jobs that could be done remotely. In places where people already are living closer to work like Manhattan, work from home has waned. The result is a change from what we previously knew, and it may stick. (Justin Fox | Bloomberg/Washington Post)

Rethinking transportation outside commutes: Researchers at Brookings took a deeper dive into what transportation data is showing us about what the pandemic restructure of transportation looks like in real time. They found that with reduced commuting, there’s no main thread holding metro areas together under one transportation narrative with stories varying based on region.  Of course there are pros and cons to this finding, but ultimately each place has a chance to write a new future or get stuck in inertia. (Adie Tomer & Caroline George | Brookings)

Copenhagen’s sponge city investments: To make sure extreme rain events don’t cause damage to the City of Copenhagen in Denmark, the city has invested 1.8B euros by 2035 in green infrastructure including catchment ponds, green spaces, adapted roads and more. Most of the funding is coming from revenue collected from the water utility and much less in taxes. After an extreme weather event that cost the city 800m euros in 2011, the city has vowed to invest in ways to absorb the water.  (Jan Petter | Spiegel International)

AI invades urban planning with mixed results: There’s a wave of interest in using generative AI in architecture and urban planning. While some believe that generative AI is about creating compelling messaging, others wish to use it to help them create detailed designs the technology is perhaps not quite ready to produce. To be useful, bigger datasets are needed, but there’s also a worry about too many boring and bad urban spaces and designs being sampled into the models as well as the imagery being used for political purposes. (Patrick Sisson | Bloomberg CityLab)

Quote of the Week

Freedom is hard to take away from people once they’ve had a taste of it. Now requiring people to work in the office can lead to lower levels of engagement, higher burnout and a lot of resentment.

–Jim Harter, psychologist and chief scientist of workplace management and wellbeing for analytics and consulting firm Gallup discussing in Newsweek the new work from home dynamics.

This week on the podcast, we’re joined by Zack Subin of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation and Ben Holland of the Rocky Mountain Institute. Ben and Zack join us to talk about their report Urban Land Use Reform on the importance of land use in reducing travel and emissions.

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