The residents of Potters Bar are working to protect the "green belt" of farms, forests, and meadows that surround London from the endless demand for AI infrastructure. A short drive from London, the town of Potters Bar is separated from the village of South Mimms by 85 acres of rolling farmland segmented by a scribble of hedgerows. In one of the fields, a lone oak serves as a rest stop along a public footpath. Lately, the tree has become a site of protest, too. A poster tied to its trunk reads: "NO TO DATA CENTRE."

Urban greenery is often linked to better health, yet findings from past research have been inconsistent. One reason is that official greenery metrics measure the amount or nearness of greenery but ignore how often people actually may potentially see or use it in daily life. To address this gap, we introduced a new classification that separates on-road greenery, which people see while walking through streets, from off-road greenery, which requires planned visits. We did so by combining aerial imagery of Greater London and greenery data from OpenStreetMap with quantified greenery from over 100,000 Google Street View images and accessibility estimates based on 160,000 road segments. We linked these measures to 7.45 billion medical prescriptions issued by the National Health Service and processed through our methodology. These prescriptions cover five conditions: diabetes, hypertension, asthma, depression, and anxiety, as well as opioid use. As hypothesized, we found that green on-road was more strongly linked to better health than four widely used official measures. For example, hypertension prescriptions dropped by 3.68% in wards with on-road greenery above the median citywide level compared to those below it. If all below-median wards reached the citywide median in on-road greenery, prescription costs could fall by up to £3.15 million each year. These results suggest that greenery seen in daily life may be more relevant than public yet secluded greenery, and that official metrics commonly used in the literature have important limitations.

Monitoring air pollution is crucial for protecting human health from exposure to harmful substances. Traditional methods of air quality monitoring, such as ground-based sensors and satellite-based remote sensing, face limitations due to high deployment costs, sparse sensor coverage, and environmental interferences. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a framework for high-resolution spatiotemporal Air Quality Index (AQI) mapping using sparse sensor data, satellite imagery, and various spatiotemporal factors. By leveraging Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), we estimate AQI values at unmonitored locations based on both spatial and temporal dependencies. The framework incorporates a wide range of environmental features, including meteorological data, road networks, points of interest (PoIs), population density, and urban green spaces, which enhance prediction accuracy. We illustrate the use of our approach through a case study in Lahore, Pakistan, where multi-resolution data is used to generate the air quality index map at a fine spatiotemporal scale.

Urban planning faces a critical challenge in balancing city-wide infrastructure needs with localized demographic preferences, particularly in rapidly developing regions. Although existing approaches typically focus on top-down optimization or bottom-up community planning, only some frameworks successfully integrate both perspectives. Our methodology employs a two-tier approach: First, a deterministic solver optimizes basic infrastructure requirements in the city region. Second, four specialized planning agents, each representing distinct sub-regions, propose demographic-specific modifications to a master planner. The master planner then evaluates and integrates these suggestions to ensure cohesive urban development. We validate our framework using a newly created dataset comprising detailed region and sub-region maps from three developing cities in India, focusing on areas undergoing rapid urbanization. The results demonstrate that this hybrid approach enables more nuanced urban development while maintaining overall city functionality.

The mayor of Australia's second biggest city's desperate attempt to get residents excited about dozens of potential new parks has been completely derailed by the use of creepy AI-generated concept images. Melbourne Lord Mayor Nick Reece took to social media on Sunday to share a series of AI-generated images of some of the parks he's promised to create if re-elected next month. Cr Reece has vowed to transform the CBD into the'Garden City' by opening 28 new parks if he returns to the top job. But the plan backfired after the AI images left residents more concerned than excited for the new greenery. The images showed a number of confusing errors, including two people laying on the ground metres away from young children playing, a man with two legs melded into one, and several extra arms, sparking a range of reactions from baffled Aussies.

Sentence transformers are language models designed to perform semantic search. This study investigates the capacity of sentence transformers, fine-tuned on general question-answering datasets for asymmetric semantic search, to associate descriptions of human-generated routes across Great Britain with queries often used to describe hiking experiences. We find that sentence transformers have some zero-shot capabilities to understand quasi-geospatial concepts, such as route types and difficulty, suggesting their potential utility for routing recommendation systems.

Participatory urban planning is the mainstream of modern urban planning and involves the active engagement of different stakeholders. However, the traditional participatory paradigm encounters challenges in time and manpower, while the generative planning tools fail to provide adjustable and inclusive solutions. This research introduces an innovative urban planning approach integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) within the participatory process. The framework, based on the crafted LLM agent, consists of role-play, collaborative generation, and feedback iteration, solving a community-level land-use task catering to 1000 distinct interests. Empirical experiments in diverse urban communities exhibit LLM's adaptability and effectiveness across varied planning scenarios. The results were evaluated on four metrics, surpassing human experts in satisfaction and inclusion, and rivaling state-of-the-art reinforcement learning methods in service and ecology. Further analysis shows the advantage of LLM agents in providing adjustable and inclusive solutions with natural language reasoning and strong scalability. While implementing the recent advancements in emulating human behavior for planning, this work envisions both planners and citizens benefiting from low-cost, efficient LLM agents, which is crucial for enhancing participation and realizing participatory urban planning.

This study investigates the interplay among social demographics, built environment characteristics, and environmental hazard exposure features in determining community level cancer prevalence. Utilizing data from five Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the United States: Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York, the study implemented an XGBoost machine learning model to predict the extent of cancer prevalence and evaluate the importance of different features. Our model demonstrates reliable performance, with results indicating that age, minority status, and population density are among the most influential factors in cancer prevalence. We further explore urban development and design strategies that could mitigate cancer prevalence, focusing on green space, developed areas, and total emissions. Through a series of experimental evaluations based on causal inference, the results show that increasing green space and reducing developed areas and total emissions could alleviate cancer prevalence. The study and findings contribute to a better understanding of the interplay among urban features and community health and also show the value of interpretable machine learning models for integrated urban design to promote public health. The findings also provide actionable insights for urban planning and design, emphasizing the need for a multifaceted approach to addressing urban health disparities through integrated urban design strategies.

The recent promotion of sustainable urban planning combined with a growing need for public interventions to improve well-being and health have led to an increased collective interest for green spaces in and around cities. In particular, parks have proven a wide range of benefits in urban areas. This also means inequities in park accessibility may contribute to health inequities. In this work, we showcase the application of classic tools from Operations Research to assist decision-makers to improve parks' accessibility, distribution and design. Given the context of public decision-making, we are particularly concerned with equity and environmental justice, and are focused on an advanced assessment of users' behavior through a spatial interaction model. We present a two-stage fair facility location and design model, which serves as a template model to assist public decision-makers at the city-level for the planning of urban green spaces. The first-stage of the optimization model is about the optimal city-budget allocation to neighborhoods based on a data exposing inequality attributes. The second-stage seeks the optimal location and design of parks for each neighborhood, and the objective consists of maximizing the total expected probability of individuals visiting parks. We show how to reformulate the latter as a mixed-integer linear program. We further introduce a clustering method to reduce the size of the problem and determine a close to optimal solution within reasonable time. The model is tested using the case study of the city of Montreal and comparative results are discussed in detail to justify the performance of the model.

Experts predict that the size of urban areas will rise by around three times between the years 2000 and 2030 [1]. It is well documented that the "structures of our cities" have a major impact on the occurrence of severe or extreme weather in the surrounding regional environment [2]. In rapidly expanding cities, especially in developing nations, these urban morphologies are characterized by impermeable surfaces, rapid loss of green area, and habitat fragmentation [3]. Green areas in cities, known collectively as urban forests, help lessen regional and local storm-related flooding and water pollution [4], improve air and water quality, moderate temperature, and promote nutrient cycling in soil, all while sequestering carbon [5]. So, Massive land transformations in urban areas--from green to concrete – result in an ever-increasing number of impermeable surfaces, resulting in an unnatural environment [6].