I asked AI to Design a New Urbanist Seaside Town

Can AI be a useful designer on your urban planning team? This is an experiment to see if we can get MidJourney AI to design a version of the New Urbanist town of Seaside, Florida.

I'm including a summary of my prompts and notes from this first episode. This is by no means a definitive experiment. We're just beginning to scratch the surface of what these tools can do for an urban design process. There will definitely be more to come.

To get AI to design a New Urbanist town, it will need to be able to generate all of the different kinds of drawings needed to actually build a place including:

Site Plan
Street Sections
Aerial Rendering
Ground-Level Perspective of a Civic Space
Ground-Level Perspective of a Street
Building Plans
Building Elevations

This video deals exclusively with site planning, and I must acknowledge that the reference imagery provided here is definitely limited. We also haven't tried blending site plan drawings with aerial photographs of the same place to see how AI overlaps the imagery.

Here's what we did for this video:

First, let’s see what happens when we ask it for a site plan of Seaside.

/imagine a technical pen and marker color site plan of the town of Seaside Florida

So far it has given us something that rendered in the appropriate style, but the configuration of elements is off. The public space doesn’t address the water, there’s a wide separation of use with a lot of parking, and we need more of a focus on residential dwellings. Let’s ask it to use New Urbanist principles in its design-thinking and reduce the parking to 0.

/imagine a technical pen and marker color site plan of the new urbanist town of Seaside Florida with its town square open toward the ocean. Commercial buildings can go along the town square, and the rest of the plan should be residential with a few buildings near the town square reserved for a town hall and a school. Do not draw parking lots.

It’s been able to create some really interesting public spaces in the variations. Some of the drawings followed our directive to disclude parking, and some haven’t. Let’s give it a reference of the actual plan and see what happens.

/imagine a technical pen and marker color site plan of the new urbanist town of Seaside Florida with its town square open toward the ocean. Commercial buildings can go along the town square, and the rest of the plan should be residential with a few buildings near the town square reserved for a town hall and a school. Do not draw parking lots. Use this site plan as a reference for how you configure the streets, blocks, buildings, and public spaces. *link to image*

The results and variations are stunning. I still can’t tell whether it knows what it’s drawing, and if it can differentiate building types and uses, or open space vs built area in a figure ground. This will be our next experiment.

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[shumoon]

I found this underwhelming. The AI could never generate anything applying Seaside's fundamental new urbanist principles. Where was the street network allowing multiple access points? Most of the plans seemed to funnel all the traffic through one or two (choke) points. And that huge parking lot!

[Amorstopineed]

very nice, i also like the look of the plan.

[gg_]

This is unbelievable. With the right training, midjourney can iterate like a team of designers in minutes

[antoniiocaluso]

"eyewash" is dandy, but can AFFORDABILITY become a REAL concern in Planning? Pretty plans are fun(?) but can YOU afford to live there? I've seen Seaside from day 1, and can guarantee its UNaffordable for 98% of viewers here! You know, there is a zillion acres of land throughout inland Florida (or the Panhandle, specifically) that would make much more sense than ruining another already-stressed waterfront environments. 72-year old FL Architect here, kids :-) That "next generation" is already unable to Afford nearly anything in FL. Sadly :-((((

[jaybrek]

Is it possible to have MJ design to the shape of the actual lot shape? I'm getting some beautiful results but the lot shapes are way off. Thanks!

[neatwheat]

How has AI gotten so versatile so fast? If some years ago someone would want to code a software for such a specific task the effort to get a reasonable result might not have outweighted the benefit and now there come along all these potent, yet universal tools. Just not perfect yet ... which certainly is a good thing for planners!

[john-lenin]

Amazing - it’s repeated the same mistakes real humans always do.

[quakeknight]

That thumbnail looks like the buildings inside a 17th century fortress

[kmarith]

Sorry what is AI you are using. I want to work with this company. Can you help to share me more

[HyewonAn-qr]

This could be used for game level design

[Lunavii_Cellest]

This can actually be very usefull. It can help with creating ideas which you can use to create a perfect plan.

[Matty]

all i see is that the modeller should only be trained on positive references. throwing in all the bad stuff we make that outnumbers the good stuff means most of the stuff that will be produced will be bad because this doesnt make new stuff, it makes remixes

[marcommat]

I would call it questionable. If now an absolute failure. These masterplans are normally drawn down to square foot space efficiency and a lot of thought goes into it. Not good at all...

[JohnDoe-uciu]

i live about 20 miles away from seaside. whenever i want to be angry at rich people i drive through seaside and look at them.

[adori]

all my jane jacobs homies hate garden cities smh
Rlly cool idea though!

[rname-rd]

What if you did this but with urban planning from the soviet union

[danieldumas]

Why wasn't AI given specifics as to the type of residential buildings (single - duplex - apartments Vs condos)? Is this model meant to be self-sufficient?? Do children even exist in this Matrix???

[CordeliaWagner]

Seperation isn't good.
US suburbias are boring purgatories because there are no shops, no Cafes, no restaurants, no public buildings for all kids of social activity.
And they are care centered.
Living nightmare for european standarts.

They giant parking lots are disturbing..
Why no public transportation???
Individual traffic in cars is against all logic and only serves Big Car and Big Oil.

A smart planned city makes private cars unneccessary and provides all kinds of transport including car-sharing services where you rent a car when you REALLY need one.

A giant parking lot is a failure.
It's not even a multi floor parking house, it's just concrete wasting space.

[alexsmith-oblu]

That is very impressive, but then again why should I be surprised?

Over the last twenty years, software developers and computer engineers have been paid handsomely for technical R&D. And almost every young person has been profoundly working with software!

What also interests me is how most office desk work will get automated, while crafty careers in the middle (I.e.: plumbing) will still require big demand. We live in very fascinating times…

[pcatful]

What is the point of the "music" ? More explanation of your process would be better than the inane "music". unlike. Stopped watching. Could have been interesting.