topos Magazine

16 September, 2025

The International Review of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design. Artificial intelligence is no longer a promise of the future – it has already become part of the systems that run our cities. It drafts emails, designs buildings, steers traffic, and powers civic chatbots. It answers before we finish asking. Sometimes it lies, sometimes it hallucinates – and yet it always responds. This issue of topos does not celebrate AI, nor does it dismiss it. Instead, it takes the machine seriously. For planners, architects and urbanists, AI is now embedded in the very fabric of urban life – silently shaping infrastructures, simulations, and decisions. But what values are hidden in its code? Who defines its assumptions? And what happens when the model becomes more legible than the street itself? We explore the promises and perils of a technology that reproduces the past more than it imagines the future, that optimises for efficiency but risks narrowing democracy. From hackers and ethicists to urban designers and policy-makers, this issue uncovers the ethical, political and practical questions behind AI’s urban influence. AI Pioneers asks not what AI can do for cities, but what it means when urbanism itself becomes a function of AI.