In Emily St. John Mandel's new novel, becoming a "ghost" means running afoul of the state. In this excerpt, a secret agent discovers it doesn't take much. True diligence is I read the sentence in a detective novel in childhood, when I was 8 or 9 years old, and then the phrase stayed with me forever after. For a long time I wrote in stylized curly letters on the inside page of every notebook, or sometimes on the front cover. I had notebooks for writing down clues, because even at 9 I wanted to work for the Internal Intelligence Service. What child doesn't secretly wish to be a spy? We were terrified and fascinated by Service in equal measure. Service was dark cars moving down the block, men and women in forgettable clothing stopping our parents on the street for brief random interrogations. Service was the force that made people disappear--when I was in the first grade, my friend from across the street climbed into the back of a black car with her parents, and their apartment stood empty for a year before other people moved in--but also Service carried a kind of dark glamour, an aura of power that called to us.

The availability and sophistication degree of such services are fair measures of progress for any city. In this context, Geographic information systems " GIS " offers solutions that support the decision - making processes regarding management, planning and distribution of services, ultimately improving the standard of living in cities (Aziz, 2007, p. 11). Investigating services planning standards is one of the most relevant issues concerning human progress regarding its proper definition and needs. Planning standards can be reconsidered by studying the variation in the distribution of geographical phenomena and the characteristi cs of geographic areas. More effort should be exerted in defining these standards parallel to the characteristics of each region. Such efforts will facilitate appropriate allocation s of services and accurate definitions of future developmental efforts. The problem of the study is that the planning standards are not suitable for the characteristics of the Egyptian cities, which include more population and intensive daily use of services. The solution to this problem is to create new planning standards that suit the rapidly changing nature of cities, and to generate these criteria current services and their intensity and the built - up areas are going to be used to reflect the characteristics of the city, taking this abroach is a new way to generate such criteria. This study attempts to derive planning standards for public services in the city of Qena that are compatible with the characteristics of the city, the geographical distribution of the population, the built - up area, and the services therein.

Generative AI, large language models, and agentic AI have emerged separately of urban planning. However, the convergence between AI and urban planning presents an interesting opportunity towards AI urban planners. Existing studies conceptualizes urban planning as a generative AI task, where AI synthesizes land-use configurations under geospatial, social, and human-centric constraints and reshape automated urban design. We further identify critical gaps of existing generative urban planning studies: 1) the generative structure has to be predefined with strong assumption: all of adversarial generator-discriminator, forward and inverse diffusion structures, hierarchical zone-POI generative structure are predefined by humans; 2) ignore the power of domain expert developed tools: domain urban planners have developed various tools in the urban planning process guided by urban theory, while existing pure neural networks based generation ignore the power of the tools developed by urban planner practitioners. To address these limitations, we outline a future research direction agentic urban AI planner, calling for a new synthesis of agentic AI and participatory urbanism.

Ensuring liveability and comfort is one of the fundamental objectives of urban planning. Numerous studies have employed computational methods to assess and quantify factors related to urban comfort such as greenery coverage, thermal comfort, and walkability. However, a clear definition of urban comfort and its comprehensive evaluation framework remain elusive. Our research explores the theoretical interpretations and methodologies for assessing urban comfort within digital planning, emphasising three key dimensions: multidimensional analysis, data support, and AI assistance.

The spatial layout of urban sites shapes land-use efficiency and spatial organization. Traditional site planning often relies on experiential judgment and single-source data, limiting systematic quantification of multifunctional layouts. We propose a Site Planning Layout Indicator (SPLI) system, a data-driven framework integrating empirical knowledge with heterogeneous multi-source data to produce structured urban spatial information. The SPLI supports multimodal spatial data systems for analytics, inference, and retrieval by combining OpenStreetMap (OSM), Points of Interest (POI), building morphology, land use, and satellite imagery. It extends conventional metrics through five dimensions: (1) Hierarchical Building Function Classification, refining empirical systems into clear hierarchies; (2) Spatial Organization, quantifying seven layout patterns (e.g., symmetrical, concentric, axial-oriented); (3) Functional Diversity, transforming qualitative assessments into measurable indicators using Functional Ratio (FR) and Simpson Index (SI); (4) Accessibility to Essential Services, integrating facility distribution and transport networks for comprehensive accessibility metrics; and (5) Land Use Intensity, using Floor Area Ratio (FAR) and Building Coverage Ratio (BCR) to assess utilization efficiency. Data gaps are addressed through deep learning, including Relational Graph Neural Networks (RGNN) and Graph Neural Networks (GNN). Experiments show the SPLI improves functional classification accuracy and provides a standardized basis for automated, data-driven urban spatial analytics.

Generative AI offers new opportunities for automating urban planning by creating site-specific urban layouts and enabling flexible design exploration. However, existing approaches often struggle to produce realistic and practical designs at scale. Therefore, we adapt a state-of-the-art Stable Diffusion model, extended with ControlNet, to generate high-fidelity satellite imagery conditioned on land use descriptions, infrastructure, and natural environments. To overcome data availability limitations, we spatially link satellite imagery with structured land use and constraint information from OpenStreetMap. Using data from three major U.S. cities, we demonstrate that the proposed diffusion model generates realistic and diverse urban landscapes by varying land-use configurations, road networks, and water bodies, facilitating cross-city learning and design diversity. We also systematically evaluate the impacts of varying language prompts and control imagery on the quality of satellite imagery generation. Our model achieves high FID and KID scores and demonstrates robustness across diverse urban contexts. Qualitative assessments from urban planners and the general public show that generated images align closely with design descriptions and constraints, and are often preferred over real images. This work establishes a benchmark for controlled urban imagery generation and highlights the potential of generative AI as a tool for enhancing planning workflows and public engagement.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) holds promise for revolutionizing various fields traditionally dominated by human expertise. Urban planning, a professional discipline that fundamentally shapes our daily surroundings, is one such field heavily relying on multifaceted domain knowledge and experience of human experts. The extent to which LLMs can assist human practitioners in urban planning remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark, UrbanPlanBench, tailored to evaluate the efficacy of LLMs in urban planning, which encompasses fundamental principles, professional knowledge, and management and regulations, aligning closely with the qualifications expected of human planners. Through extensive evaluation, we reveal a significant imbalance in the acquisition of planning knowledge among LLMs, with even the most proficient models falling short of meeting professional standards. For instance, we observe that 70% of LLMs achieve subpar performance in understanding planning regulations compared to other aspects. Besides the benchmark, we present the largest-ever supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset, UrbanPlanText, comprising over 30,000 instruction pairs sourced from urban planning exams and textbooks. Our findings demonstrate that fine-tuned models exhibit enhanced performance in memorization tests and comprehension of urban planning knowledge, while there exists significant room for improvement, particularly in tasks requiring domain-specific terminology and reasoning. By making our benchmark, dataset, and associated evaluation and fine-tuning toolsets publicly available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/PlanBench, we aim to catalyze the integration of LLMs into practical urban planning, fostering a symbiotic collaboration between human expertise and machine intelligence.

The integration of large language models (LLMs) into public transit systems presents a transformative opportunity to enhance urban mobility. This study explores the potential of LLMs to revolutionize public transportation management within the context of San Antonio's transit system. Leveraging the capabilities of LLMs in natural language processing and data analysis, we investigate their capabilities to optimize route planning, reduce wait times, and provide personalized travel assistance. By utilizing the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) and other relevant data, this research aims to demonstrate how LLMs can potentially improve resource allocation, elevate passenger satisfaction, and inform data-driven decision-making in transit operations. A comparative analysis of different ChatGPT models was conducted to assess their ability to understand transportation information, retrieve relevant data, and provide comprehensive responses. Findings from this study suggest that while LLMs hold immense promise for public transit, careful engineering and fine-tuning are essential to realizing their full potential. San Antonio serves as a case study to inform the development of LLM-powered transit systems in other urban environments.

Urban regeneration presents significant challenges within the context of urbanization, requiring adaptive approaches to tackle evolving needs. Leveraging advancements in large language models (LLMs), we propose Cyclical Urban Planning (CUP), a new paradigm that continuously generates, evaluates, and refines urban plans in a closed-loop. Specifically, our multi-agent LLM-based framework consists of three key components: (1) Planning, where LLM agents generate and refine urban plans based on contextual data; (2) Living, where agents simulate the behaviors and interactions of residents, modeling life in the urban environment; and (3) Judging, which involves evaluating plan effectiveness and providing iterative feedback for improvement. The cyclical process enables a dynamic and responsive planning approach. Experiments on the real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework as a continuous and adaptive planning process.

This study explores the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in urban biodiversity conservation, its applications, and a framework for implementation. Key findings show that: (a) AI enhances species detection and monitoring, achieving over 90% accuracy in urban wildlife tracking and invasive species management; (b) integrating data from remote sensing, acoustic monitoring, and citizen science enables large-scale ecosystem analysis; and (c) AI decision tools improve conservation planning and resource allocation, increasing prediction accuracy by up to 18.5% compared to traditional methods. The research presents an AI-Driven Framework for Urban Biodiversity Management, highlighting AI's impact on monitoring, conservation strategies, and ecological outcomes. Implementation strategies include: (a) standardizing data collection and model validation, (b) ensuring equitable AI access across urban contexts, and (c) developing ethical guidelines for biodiversity monitoring. The study concludes that integrating AI in urban biodiversity conservation requires balancing innovation with ecological wisdom and addressing data quality, socioeconomic disparities, and ethical concerns.