The Age of Intelligence: Urban Design Thinking, Method Turning and Exploration

Abstract

This paper puts forward some reflections on the great change of thoughts and mythologies in urban design by technological breakthrough an presents the application of artificial intelligence in urban design. Firstly, it reviews and rethinks on the traditional philosophical bases and original thinking paradigms in urban design, facing up to the limitations and problems of existing design methods. Then by using philosophy of new materialism, new technologies such as machine learning and new data represented by multi-source urban data those having emerged in recent years in order to clarify the possibility of new technologies for urban analysis and design simulation. In particular, convolution neural network has been used to make a large-scale and fine discriminant on the style of urban texture and land use classification. Finally, based on discussions, the paper further clarifies the main direction of current research, which is the possibility of artificial intelligence intervening in urban complex systems and new technologies for urban analysis, designs and simulations. The authors believe that these explorations not only provide more accurate and intuitive analysis in research methods, but also provide the possibility to innovate existing design thoughts and methods by applying artificial intelligence technology to serve urban design research.