RIBA Think

Piece Series
Digital planning

Ideas to make it happen

Planning (in) the

digitalised future
By Peter Stewart

Today, it feels as if we are still in the digital Stone Age when it

comes to the planning process.
If youve been excited by the digital world created in Alfonso Cuarons Gravity, then looking up a planning
application on a local authority website is likely to bring you back down to earth with even more of a bump than
Sandra Bullocks landing. What are the prospects for better and more sophisticated digitisation of the planning
system?
Its not hard to imagine amazing possibilities for spatial planning in a digitised world, given the continuing
exponential growth of computing power and capacity that we can expect (even if Moores Law now turns out to
have been more of a guideline a bit like planning policies). The kind of digital imagery we are used to
seeing on Time Team, with successive phases of building on an archaeological site reconstructed in fast
forward fly-throughs, could be used for future project proposals and made available for consultees to review on
a local authority website. Or a dynamic imaging app could allow you to hold up your iPad in front of you on site
and view a new scheme overlaid on reality, as it would appear from that viewpoint. Increasingly detailed digital
city models already exist, and with more detailed data, greater computing power and better applications, the
possibilities for inserting schemes in a digital world are exciting.
But today, it feels as if we are still in the digital Stone Age when it comes to the planning process. The
applications suggested above wouldnt need any technology we dont have already (and probably exist already
in some form) - but they are not likely to become standard practice soon. The reality is that digitisation of the
planning system is in its infancy and for the most part it is in the hands of local authorities, who are generally
not at the bleeding edge of technology. The presentation of planning applications on a local authority website is
typically poor: dumb search functions with no fuzzy logic, so you cant find a site in the first place; bad indexing
of documents if you do find them; and documents scanned at poor resolution, or in such large files that they are
broken into dozens of parts for downloading.
In the spirit of learning to walk before you can run, I suggest we need to think about the digital near future a bit
harder, and worry about the more distant future when the present system is working properly. What would be
nice this year would be:

National standards for presenting data, so that a search on any local authority website looks the same
(or better, is a national resource)
Standards of search functions that match those of say Google not much to ask, but the present
reality is a long way from that; and all data geo-located on maps.
Clear, user friendly presentation of planning documents, in digital originals rather than scans, viewable
online without needing to download, and all suitable for a lay person with a home PC.

All that would be a good start, but would appear to be some way off.
What about further ahead? Even as the physical reality of building proposals can be presented in more and
more sophisticated ways through computer modelling, will this bring about better planning? Its hard to see
why one should expect that. The many problems of the UK planning system are not mainly to do with lack of
access to data.

Digital exclusion, too, should be a major concern in a system that is supposed to be democratically accountable.
Your 80 year old mother might want to say something about the Wetherspoon planned to open on her doorstep
(mine did), but the average council website will not make it easy for her, even if she did use the internet.
In an optimistic version of the digital future, planning authorities will be much more readily able to receive data
as well as to disseminate it. In that case, will voters still want their councillors deciding what will happen why
not decision-making by popular vote? Compared with a digital city model, the system that would allow citizens
to vote online on planning applications and strategies would be pretty straightforward. But there is little appetite
anywhere - least of all with the politicians who would have to give up the power they enjoy - for rule by plebiscite rather than by representative government.
That might lead you to wonder what the point would be in providing citizens with increasingly sophisticated data
concerning things they are not being asked to decide on in any case.
By the time we are ready to move to a more sophisticated level of digital planning, there will be hardware and
software as yet undreamt of, so lets worry about that when the time comes. A system that allows you access to
the data you seek without a significant rise in blood pressure would be good for now.
Author
Peter Stewart, a chartered architect, is the principal of Peter
Stewart Consultancy, a practice which provides expert advice on
architecture, urban design and the historic environment,
specialising in high profile projects and sensitive sites. He was
the Director of the design review programme at CABE from
1999 to 2005. He has served as Chair of the RIBA Planning
Group and a member of the RIBA Council. His blog The Gutter
and the Stars can be read at http://pscpa.blogspot.co.uk/

Towards an Internet of things

for the built environment
By Antonio Pisan

The technology is ready. The question is: are policy makers capable
of driving innovation or will it be down to the private market of
system consultants to show the way?
At once fascinating and terrifying, the emergence of the Internet of Things seems an unstoppable drift that
digital technology will impose on the way we experience the world.
For the ones who may not be familiar with the term, The Internet of Things is a digital image of the world.
In other words, every entity (product, system, person etc.) that forms part of the real world can have a digital
counterpart in the Internet of Things. The key difference between the real world and the digital one is that the
latter does not impose limits to the speed nor volume of interaction between entities. If humans are limited
by their own specific capacity to receive, process and react to information, the entities forming the Internet of
Things can exchange a large amount of data in a negligible amount of time. This makes the Internet of Things
a responsive network in which systems interact and readjust themselves in relation to one another. The Internet
of Things is a System of Systems. To give a simple - and rather simplistic - example, if the water distribution
system could interact with the traffic management system, the latter could divert or reroute traffic to avoid the
danger of driving through flooded areas as soon as the first system communicates to the second one of the
presence of an issue. Humans can also divert traffic in flooded areas, but not as rapidly or efficiently. An intelligent system of systems is faster and more efficient than human control. If we could introduce a systemic
and responsive approach to the management of specific sectors such as food, energy, social welfare, housing
or crime prevention, the use of resources would be improved, limiting waste and contributing towards a more
resilient and balanced society.
Focusing on the impact on the built environment, how could we unlock the efficiency hidden in the integrated
management of buildings and infrastructure together?
First we need to gather the data that will let us represent the built environment in the digital realm to create a
digital image of the real system. The task is challenging to say the least. Some sectors, like the energy supply
and property markets, already have robust and efficient data management systems, more or less ready to be
shared; others, like the construction industry and the planning system are quite far behind. One solution could
be to use planning applications to gather data in a standardised format across the country.
The online planning portal could quite easily become a digital building site.
Instead of planning applicants being asked to submit design and access statements, they should be asked to
upload a single project database (similar to BIM databases, only expanded) containing relevant, standardised,
information about: location, massing, building design, materials, carbon emissions, structure, services, energy
performance, occupancy, programme, resources, jobsetc..
If planners and applicants shared the same database structure, applying for planning would become as simple
as uploading content to a wordpress website. This could also make the planning system faster and less overloaded.

The key to achieving this is defining the specifications of such a database in order to capture the complexity of the built environment: GIS data, to define the location of the building on the planet; geometrical data, to
define its volumetric massing and deal with right of light issues; an overall 3D model of the borough, to allow
swift evaluation of the impact of the proposed development on the Local Character, to ensure compliance
with Conservation Area guidelines; and an articulated palette of facade materials, to simplify the evaluation of
Local Amenity and Planning Conditions. Through this, Unitary Development Plans could not only be written or
illustrated but built in a digital space to highlight opportunities for things like Public and Private Partnerships
etc. Additionally, augmented reality simulations would allow planning committees to speed up their decisions
avoiding the confusion often caused by drawings and renderings.
Our recommendation is to re shape the planning system as a digital building site through which applicants are
asked to share their BIM database according to a standard form. This would make built environment cross-system integration more efficient.
The change we propose is at once revolutionary and conservative. If an expanded BIM model is a bit more
refined than a design and access statement, filling in a form is still filling in a form!
A BIM based planning system will allow the creation of an Internet of Things for the built environment through
which policy makers will be able to improve the efficiency of

Housing: mapping occupancy and driving council tax variation

Energy: mapping bills and driving retrofitting
Employment: mapping unemployment and driving development
etc.

The technology is ready. The question is: are policy makers capable of driving innovation or will it be down to the
private market of system consultants to show the way?
Marcel Mauer Architecture work in partnership with CAIRE Urbanistica to find innovative, data driven solutions
to improve the outcome of public and private planning, from regional strategies to building design.
Author
Antonio Pisan is an architect, co-founder and director at Marcel
Mauer Architecture (UK) and partner at CAIRE Urbanistica in
Italy, leading the Smart City sector. Antonio has vast experience
both in the UK and overseas, master-planning residential,
hospitality, office and mixed-use projects in the UK, Turkey, Italy
and China. Before setting-up Marcel Mauer Architecture he
worked as designer and sustainability champion at Sheppard
Robson Architects. His active contribution to Government
Policies and the debate around innovation is the construction
industry is proven by his membership of the CIC (former BIS
IGT) 2050Group and the co-chairmanship of G4C
Constructing Excellence. He guest-lectured and took part in
various events related to sustainability and smart city, published
articles on architecture, planning, big data and contemporary art
and took part in exhibitions, TV and radio shows.

Science, communication and urban

planning practice
By Flora Roumpani and Prof. Sir Alan Wilson

The rise of the digital age provides a unique opportunity to achieve

real interdisciplinarity by integrating our knowledge urban
science with an ability to communicate, to connect planners to
urban communities.
When the architect Le Corbusier and his peers from the 20th century proclaimed that form follows function
they expressed a significant idea which was widely applied in the architecture of the industrial revolution. In
many ways this notion also applies on the urban environment. Cities are complex systems and their spatial
substance is heavily dependent on socio-economic activities. This complexity is one of the reasons why urban
planning practice has always been supported by a range of disciplines. The rise of the digital age provides a
unique opportunity to achieve real interdisciplinarity by integrating our knowledge urban science with an
ability to communicate, to connect planners to urban communities. Figure 1 outlines the steps through which
this could be achieved by harnessing big data and technology.

Figure 1. An interactive modelling and planning system

The first step is the digitisation of various forms of data, as outlined on the left hand side of the diagram. The
data can vary between static data, dynamic real time data (i.e. big data) and planning knowledge. If processed
appropriately, these datasets can be put into an intelligently searchable information system to provide inputs
for a wide range of analytical and modelling software. Based on these inputs, different planning scenarios can
be generated via advanced mathematical techniques developed to model the high levels of interdependence
between the elements of an urban system (Wilson, 2013). Spatial interaction and predictive modelling are
examples of these techniques.
Visualisation helps connect function (the science) with form (design).. The emergence of procedural modelling
in computer graphics has made it possible to create 3D visualisations of possible scenarios based on urban
theory rules (Parish, Mller, 2001). This enabled generating and managing digital representations of not only
physical, but also functional characteristics of a facility. For the built environment, this means that fully realistic
3D planning scenarios of cities can now be automatically generated using urban modelling (Roumpani, 2013).

Such interactive visualizations embed communication at the heart of modelling systems, enabling products
like ESRIs City Engine to engage with urban communities via interactive applications and online platforms (e.g.
webGL platforms).
Early implementations of these include projects that attempt to explain the interaction between different land
uses of a city using spatial interaction and related techniques (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Polycentric radial town

example, demonstrating the basic
location theory by connecting
geographic location with economic
activity. Colours in the 3D diagram
indicate different activities. Land
uses with higher
economic activities tend to
concentrate closer to the 3 centres
of the city shown in red.

These projects demonstrate how dynamic urban modelling theories can be used to model 3D real-time
interactive animations of cities. They offer users the ability to test how cities may evolve under different
scenarios, which they can control and alter. The outputs are both visual and analytical, as there is the option of
providing 3D diagrams and matrices of different statistics (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Interactive controls of the models indicators from City Engine.

The development of such systems provides a framework for the digitization process, allows the integration of
planning inputs and models, and communicates the outcomes to different groups of users.

A challenge for digitising the planning system will be defining spatially-related problems that accurately reflect
real life, and use these as a basis for modelling in a planning context (Smith et al, 2014). If this can be achieved,
a Digitised Planning System could provide a means for testing the impact of various developments and
improve the ability of local authorities to interact and communicate with the public. For example, it could help
determine optimal social infrastructure and accessibility provision within new developments, by allowing users
to experiment with, visualise, and simulate the impact of different locations for retail, education or health
facilities, and compare this with optimum results according to urban theory. See Figure 4.

Figure 4. Allocation of facilities using urban modelling and accessibility measures. The user in this case can interactively select the
areas that generate employment (red) and the interactive system outputs the optimum locations for social infrastructure such as
retail facilities (Shown in yellow).

In summary: the challenges for digitising the planning system are fourfold. Firstly, integrating new data sources
with old ones as in Figure 1, and to have a means of visualising the data as in City Engine (Roumpani, 2013);
secondly, making the best use of this data with analytical and modelling tools (cf. Wilson, 2013); thirdly, integrating these methods with existing approaches to master planning (Kropf, 2013); and fourthly, to demonstrate how
these methods can be communicated to the wider community and thus form the basis for interactive planning.
References
Kropf, K. (2013) Intelligent Master Planning Tools, Working Paper Series 194, CASA, UCL.
Parish Y. I. H., Mller P. (2001) Procedural Modeling of Cities. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference on
Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, 301308. SIGGRAPH 01. New York, NY, USA: ACM.
Roumpani, F. (2013) Developing classical and contemporary models in ESRIs City Engine, Working Paper Series
191, CASA, UCL.
Smith A.H., Batty M., Hugel S., Roumpani F., Gray S. (2014, under review) Self-monitoring, Analysis and Reporting
Technologies (SMART) in Cities: Data, Dashboards and Procedural Urban Modelling. The Cambridge Journal of
Regions Economy and Society.
Wilson, A. G. (2013) the science of cities and regions, Springer, Heidelburg.
Authors
Flora Roumpani is an MRes graduate and a PhD candidate at
the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis in Bartlett UCL and
holds a diploma on Architecture Engineering from the
Department of Architecture in the University of Patras. During
her studies she worked as a researcher in the Laboratory of
Urban and Regional Planning in research projects relating to
urban analysis and visualisation. For 4 years, she worked as
an architect as part of the urban planning team in Doxiadis
Associates, in several projects in Greece and abroad. Research
interests include issues concerning the future of the city, virtual
environments and urban modelling. Research blog:
www.en-topia.blogspot.co.uk.

Sir Alan Wilson FBA, FRS is Professor of Urban and Regional

Systems in the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at
University College London and until recently, was Chair of the
AHRC. His current research, supported by ESRC and EPSRC
grants of around 3m, is on the evolution of cities and the
dynamics of global trade and migration. He was Vice-Chancellor
of the University of Leeds from 1991 to 2004 when he became
Director-General for Higher Education in the Department for
Education and Skills. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and
of the Royal Society and was knighted for services to higher
education in 2001. His book, Knowledge Power, was published
in 2010, The science of cities and regions, and his five volume
(edited) Urban modelling in September 2012.

Envisaging a digitalised
planning system
By Peter Insole

I see a digitised planning system as primarily an innovative webbased tool through which local communities can engage in
shaping neighbourhoods and learn about the historic development
of places; and use this knowledge to inform planning decisions at
the neighbourhood scale.
The planning system should enable local authorities to promote the creation of quality places, encourage
greater participation in placemaking, and embed a range of aspects - such as heritage- at the heart of
sustainable urban design. Big data and smart technologies provide new opportunities to achieve these
objectives.
I see a digitised planning system as primarily an innovative web-based tool through which local communities
can engage in shaping neighbourhoods and learn about the historic development of places; and use this
knowledge to inform planning decisions at the neighbourhood scale.
In addition to standard planning data, a digitised planning system should therefore provide access to local
historic archives through a mapping interface allowing users to overlay different types of maps (spatial and
temporal) and to upload locally sourced information. This would directly help enhance important Local
Authority records, e.g. Historic Environmental Records (HER), and make them an immediate material planning
consideration.
A digitised planning system should also provide an online facility to map community character to enable
members of the public to define the character and distinctiveness of their neighbourhood. It should be capable
of creating a visual language that links the characters description to local development management policies
on local character and distinctiveness.
A range of neighbourhood planning tools already exist that help assess the qualities of a place, showing what
improvements are needed, and focusing people to working together to achieve them e.g. Placecheck. However,
a digitised planning system should go beyond these applications in having a direct and systematic link between
the participatory process and planning and policy.
At Bristol City Council, we have established Our Place a tool that enables communities to participate in
character mapping to understand the value of the process, and define their local context in accordance with
HER data structures. This approach reduces the resource implications of a participatory approach for the local
authority as the data collected is returned in the appropriate format and can be directly related to Development
Management policies on Local Character and Distinctiveness.
We have trialled Our Place in five varied areas of the city - from inner city environments to open parkland, and
conservation areas to post war housing estates. In one instance Our Place has enabled the community to create
a Conservation Area Character Appraisal with limited resource implications for the local authority. After one day
of mapping by the community, the results were added to an established Our Place character template that
defines the local character areas along with specific challenges and opportunities. Other communities have

used the approach to inform neighbourhood planning, and to feed into the context study for a Bristol Central
Areas Plan.
Applications like this could be scaled up to create a successful digitised planning system that saves costs and
money, and provides a platform for linking community participation to planning policy and guidance about the
value of local places and their character. It could help create community-led incentives to inform community
design statements, like in the case of Our Place. But it could also be used for many other projects to drive the
creation of sustainable and socially productive places. Additionally, it could facilitate the planning process by
quickly disseminating information (e.g. share draft documents and invite comments) and record and evaluate
the process through social media. This would help share the communitys experience and encourage others to
participate. These type of initiatives will have to be reliant on specialist local authority data managers to help
create an efficient and effective system.
The approach would link the public back with the planning process, and is likely to appeal to local ward
councillors who may see a digitised planning system as a way for local amenity groups to become proactive in
shaping the future of their neighbourhood in partnership with their local authority.
If the already existing neighbourhood planning engagement tools, such as Our Place, could be rolled out to an
LA level and beyond the results of neighbourhood-level planning projects could be seen in relation to each
other, which would help widen the understanding of the distinctiveness of individual neighbourhoods and begin
a collaborative placemaking process based on a thorough understanding of place.
The tools and data to achieve a digitised planning system already exist now its a matter of connecting all the
dots and rolling out the approach across Local Authorities to bring back character and local meaning to place
creation.
Author
Peter Insole has worked for Bristol City Council since 2007 in
their multi-disciplinary City Design Group consisting of urban
designers, conservation officers, landscape architects and
archaeological officers. During this time he has managed the
Bristol Historic Environment Record (HER), provided
archaeological development management advice and
contributed to the creation of the citys heritage planning
policies. In 2010 Peter successfully applied for funding to
develop the web resource Know Your Place (www.bristol.gov.uk/
knowyourplace). This unique resource now underpins the
councils approach to the historic environment making archives
more accessible and encouraging members of the public to
share their own understanding of place.

A SMART approach to digital

planning and design
By Tim Stonor

Fundamentally, the ways in which built environment data is used

must change. Planners need to think at a much finer grain than
before and architects at a broader one.
From pedestrian precincts to cul de sacs and upper level walkways, many innovations in urban planning and
design have been launched with great optimism, only to blight new developments with massive social and
financial costs. I believe there are two key reasons why this process of trial and error continues to happen: first,
the scarcity of real knowledge about how people behave and, second, a shortage of accurate and reliable
forecasting tools to test plans in advance. Until recently it has been expensive and time-consuming to
overcome these issues: teams of observers with clip boards are costly; transcribing video is time-consuming.
However, the rise of the smart era has witnessed an explosion of data capture and analysis techniques that
can give us accurate and useful insights into how people behave. This matters because professional failure
creates public concern.
If using big data effectively to design places can result in developments that work better for the public and
local economy, then local authorities should not only seek to use the best analytics to capture it themselves, but
should also demand the same of the private sector. But how can they and others use the newly available data
effectively?
Fundamentally, the ways in which built environment data is used must change. Planners need to think at a much
finer grain than before and architects at a broader one.
At present, architects use Building Information Modelling (BIM) systems that handle data at the building level.
While BIM can stretch to small clusters of buildings, it does not usually allow buildings to be set in their wider
urban contexts. As a result, the important influence of context on place is lost and too many buildings are
designed in isolation, with obviously negative results once built.
Planners on the other hand tend to work from regional and city-wide scales down to ward and postcode levels,
where their engagement with urbanism stops. But this can prove too crude to get an accurate picture of what is
going on at the important human scale. What they need is to be able to analyse data to inform decisions - such
as transport plans or changing land values at least down to the level of the individual street segment and
ideally to the different buildings that make up the street.
A digitised system of planning and design should allow all of the buildings to talk to each other, then all the
blocks in a neighbourhood to talk with each other, then all the neighbourhoods within a district to talk to each
other and so on. This would be an Urban BIM: a system that integrates professional activity and leaves no
spatial voids.
But what does talking to each other actually mean? It certainly involves visualisation of data on a common
platform. But it also means going beyond visualisation into data analysis, correlation and modelling. I am
troubled by many of the conference presentations and discussions about smart cities that focus, sometimes
obsess, on the visualisation of data - the creation of pretty maps and video clips - then go no further. A Digitised
Planning System should be able to understand relationships between a number of different issues combined

together, as the most important potential benefits desired by planners or developers are likely to be the result
of a combination of these. In my own experience this means being able to associate input decisions on spatial
layout and land use to outcome phenomena such as land value, movement, crime risk and carbon emissions.
A Digitised Planning System should equip architects, planners and stakeholders generally to properly weigh up
the pros and cons of different options in delivering outcomes. I offer the following SMART approach:
A SMART Approach to Digital Planning and Design
Sense/Survey
Capture useful urban performance data such as the demographics of a particular place, location
of different types of retail, types of employment and typical travel patterns as well as urban form
data including spatial accessibility, topography, building location, capacity and condition.
Map
Spatially visualise that data e.g. develop maps that geo-locate the various urban performance and
urban form characteristics.
Analyse
Use statistical tools to search the data for patterns, associations and correlations e.g. link observed
pedestrian movement data with spatial accessibility levels and factor in the land use attraction
created by shops and transport nodes. Infer via a software model simulation where residents are
likely to want to travel to in the city and what sort of uptake there might be for a new bus route or
cycle path. Use that software model to try out different options for changing the area and review
how they would impact on the way the city works, in order to decide on which one would be most
appropriate.
React
Produce evidence-based policy, plans and detailed designs.
Test
Use models to forecast the impacts of proposals in advance. Use the results of these forecasts to
discuss ideas with stakeholders.
Once a particular option has been decided on and implemented, monitor how accurate the
predictions were, in order to help refine and further develop the model. In other words, repeat the
SMART cycle through further sensing, mapping, analysis, reaction and testing.
By taking such an approach, a Digitised Planning System would equip local authorities with their own live
models of how their areas work across a range of scales, and use these to evaluate the likely impacts of designs
from developers on the wider city. This then would make it possible for evidence-based planning decisions to
be taken, giving local authorities firm grounds, for example, to negotiate design changes with developers.
One example of this approach is the City of Londons current development of a model to describe pedestrian
movement within the city that will enable it to test how particular development proposals would affect this.
Much experience has been gained over the last few years in the methods and tools required to develop
models such as that sought by the City of London: models that are comprehensive enough to enable the overall
impacts of different options to be thoroughly and reliably tested against each other yet sufficiently detailed to
inform architectural and landscape design discussions.
My belief is that this approach can lead to the creation of a coherent Digital Planning System in the UK, which
reconciles forecasting with accuracy, and the public with the planning process.

Author

Tim Stonor is an architect and urban planner. He is an

internationally respected expert in the analysis and design of
human behaviour patterns in buildings and urban areas. His
work explores how social, economic and environmental value
is created by the movement, interaction and transaction of
people in space. Tim advises public, private and community
organisations worldwide. His approach combines robust analysis
and visionary thinking. He is Managing Director of the strategic
consulting firm Space Syntax Limited, which he founded in 1996.
A director of The Academy of Urbanism, Fellow of the Royal
Society of Arts, winner of the prestigious Harvard Loeb
Fellowship and Advocate for the EPSRC, he is a Visiting
Professor at University College London. He recently joined the
Lead Expert Group of the UK Governments Foresight project on
The Future of Cities. Tim also speaks regularly at conferences
throughout the world.

Convergent City: Imagining

planning in a digitised future
By Ulysses Sengupta and Robert Hyde

Society is changing due to new digital technologies and planning

can help define this transformation.
Any discussion about digitising the planning system is meaningless without discussion on the future context of
operation and aim. This report recognises new digital technologies as a significant future disruptor (Manyika et
al., 2013) across disciplines. In order to address this change proactively there is a need to engage with potential
futures.
Working with future trajectories
While it is impossible to predict the specific outcomes of future technologies, current trajectories strongly
indicate increased digitisation, increasing symbiosis between people and technology and the increased use of
machine learning to perform tasks such as weather pattern prediction or gene sequence analysis - requiring
multiple iterations and calculations that would manually prove impossible. We may not know the future, but
examples such as the governments Open Data initiative clearly demonstrate direction, and we can choose to
approach this direction in a flexible and adaptable manner.
Machine learning will enable city simulation
Machine Learning, a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) (McCarthy et al., n.d.), is the study of systems that learn
from data. With the advent of Big Data, this branch of research has come to the forefront. Applications using
machine learning already surround us. Google or Bing search engines rank websites for our web searches based
on relevance, and junk mail filters learn from our habits in order to filter more efficiently. Pattern recognition the ability to recognise or assign a value to a new input is an essential part of machine learning, and recent
developments in computer vision (E.g. face recognition) and Natural language processing (NLP) demonstrate
direct translation of real world knowledge into digitally recognisable data without the need for prior
categorisation. Machine learning can now create new systems that can regulate themselves based on external
references, enabling the development of simulated cities that reflect real ones. The parallel behaviour of virtual/
simulated cities and real ones will depend on AI research addressing the collective intelligence we see in cities
(Weinstock and Gharleghi, 2013).
Cities are complex adaptive systems
Cities are complex adaptive systems (CAS). I.e. systems that exist without a singular form of top-down control
and evolve over time at multiple scales through an ability to learn. Other examples are the stock market, the
biosphere and the ecosystem, the immune system and most human social group-based endeavours in a
cultural and social system such as political parties or communities. Parallel computing and machine learning
are providing new possibilities for digital simulation of these emergent systems. CAS uses internal models to
anticipate the future (Holland, 1992). I.e. test multiple future scenarios and adjust current actions based on
learning. Digital simulations will provide decision making tools for people, planning and governance to test
actions in the context of resilience (Walker et al., 2004)(Holling, 1996) and adaptation.
The convergent city
There is an increasing convergence between the virtual and the real. This is manifested in machine learning,
simulations of real world systems and the growth of the Internet of Things (Ashton, 2009). This convergence in
the context of digital simulation models of cities is an essential future trajectory leading to increasingly accurate

simulations and automatic data exchange between the real and the simulated/data city. Sensors and monitoring
devices installed in the name of Smart Cities may have a role to play in data acquisition, but the real potential is
in the interfaces allowing interaction with these AI enabled data models.
Open data and direct democracy
Open data promises a new phase for society where people and organisations at multiple levels will access
customised services in exchange for voluntary data surrender. Resilient and experimental socio-economic
endeavours will result from increased flow and legibility of information allowing maximum awareness of context
and changes. In the design and management of our environment, the potential of Open data lies not only in
access to current information, but in direct forms of democratic city planning using interactive interfaces.
Instead of having the option to object to top-down planning decisions only, citizens will be involved in a
bi-directional process enabling suggestion of ideas and voting on projects and ideas they desire most.
Structural change resulting in an accountable government providing feedback and real actions along with a
digital simulation models to test new ideas will both be essential to such an outcome.
Digital planning
Society is changing due to new digital technologies and planning can help define this transformation.
Structural shifts afforded by digital disruptors requires an interface between people, governance and the
environment, more than increased efficiency of access to archival information. Digital planning must be the
portal through which a) a virtual city is updated in real time; b) data is visualised in recognisable geo-spatial
form; c) simulations are run to explore the viability of existing/future policies and interventions; d) urban debates
and discussions take place; e) the real and virtual cities are convergent. The question of what this future
interface looks like must be open-ended. However, given that we experience the complex interactions of real
cities in four dimensions (including temporal), this is a useful cognitive starting point for a virtual city (with
additional data displays) platform. A convergent virtual city that is updated in real time, incorporating machine
learning and utilising simulations to test future scenarios to allow informed decisions and identify current and
future problems and opportunities. Once in place the digital planning system must act as an open platform
encouraging Civic Hacking for individuals to develop additional customised interfaces and services and become
evolutionary itself.
Authors
Ulysses Sengupta is a Senior Lecturer at the Manchester
School of Architecture and was previously at the University of
Nottingham and the University of East London. He works with
a complexity science framework to address complex urban
situations produced by the rapid rate of urbanisation today and
the resulting extreme changes to the physical fabric of many
cities. His research is interdisciplinary and overlaps with Future
Cities, Smart Cities, Big Data and Open Government agendas.
Ulysses current research focuses on how to design and manage
future cities through co-productive platforms based around real
time geo-spatial systems. He is also Director of Softgrid Limited
a research, design and consultation practice, specialising in city
planning, urban regeneration, computational methodologies and
integrated approaches to sustainability.

Rob Hyde is an Architect and Senior Lecturer at the Manchester

School of Architecture where he runs a Post Graduate Studio
+ Research Atelier and is the strategic lead on Professional
Studies. With a particular interest in Future Cities, trans-disciplinary collaborative working and application of complexity science
onto the urban realm. His current research focuses on the future
alternative physical/ spatial, business/practice and governance
opportunities afforded by Big/Open Data, Smart Cities etc.
asking the question: What does policy look like? [or could/
should look like?] and developing platforms to facilitate this.