Less than a decade later, artificial intelligence is taking this idea so much further. FaceLift is a new AI system developed by Nokia Bell Labs Cambridge that allows scientists and urban planners to use a crowd's aggregated sensibility to actually redesign the look of city streets. FaceLift AI can take any Google Street View scene and beautify it instantly--but at what cost? To create FaceLift, 82,000 volunteers from 162 countries were tasked with rating 20,000 Google Street View images as beautiful or ugly. That data was pumped into an AI that then deconstructed people's preferences by features in these scenes: It learned picnic areas, orchards, and plazas were considered beautiful, while viaducts and construction sites were not.

Researchers at MIT Media Lab are using crowdsourced data to create an algorithm that determines how safe a street looks to the human eye – information that could be used to guide important urban design decisions. In 2011, researchers at the MIT Media Lab debuted Place Pulse, a website that served as a kind of "hot or not" for cities. Given two Google Street View images culled from a select few cities including New York City and Boston, the site asked users to click on the one that seemed safer, more affluent, or more unique. The result was an empirical way to measure urban aesthetics. Now, that data is being used to predict what parts of cities feel the safest.

In 2011, researchers at the MIT Media Lab debuted Place Pulse, a website that served as a kind of "hot or not" for cities. Given two Google Street View images culled from a select few cities including New York City and Boston, the site asked users to click on the one that seemed safer, more affluent, or more unique. The result was an empirical way to measure urban aesthetics. Now, that data is being used to predict what parts of cities feel the safest. StreetScore, a collaboration between the MIT Media Lab's Macro Connections and Camera Culture groups, uses an algorithm to create a super high-resolution map of urban perceptions.