63rd IMCL Will Explore the Impact of Artificial Intelligence in Urban Planning and Design

Amont other topics, sessions and workshops will consider how to use AI in generative design while avoiding its dangers; generative pattern language approaches will also be explored.

JELGAVA, LATVIA - Among the many challenges facing cities and towns today, artificial intelligence looms as both an opportunity and a threat — and, for most practitioners working in planning and design, a growing challenge to understand and engage.

The tools are arriving faster than the frameworks for evaluating them; the promises are extravagant; the risks are real but unevenly understood; and the public conversation offers little guidance to the professionals and communities who must make consequential decisions right now, with imperfect information and genuine stakes.

It is just this kind of challenge — complex, urgent, and resistant to easy resolution — that the International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conferences have always been aimed to address. When the 63rd IMCL convenes July 6–10, 2026 in Riga and Jelgava, it will bring together planners, designers, researchers, and civic leaders to grapple with the full range of pressures reshaping human settlements: housing affordability and the erosion of mixed-income neighborhoods; the imperative of climate adaptation in both historic urban cores and newer suburban fabrics; the recovery of walkable, human-scaled street life in cities long organized around the automobile; and the enduring question of how communities can exercise meaningful agency over the places they inhabit.

As it is in so much of our lives today, AI will be a significant thread running through these conversations — but seen in perspective, and examined in relation to the broader challenges rather than in isolation from them.

Latvia itself offers a fitting backdrop. Riga's historic center, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one of the finest concentrations of Art Nouveau architecture in the world, a built environment shaped by a sophisticated 19th- and early 20th-century understanding of ornament, human scale, and urban continuity.

Jelgava, the conference's second host city, carries a different but equally instructive history — a city rebuilt after wartime devastation, still working through the long aftermath of Soviet-era planning, and actively reimagining its future. Together, the two cities embody many of the tensions the conference will explore: between preservation and renewal, between inherited urban wisdom and the pressure to modernize, between the claims of history and the demands of the present.

Beyond the Binary

The poles of the AI debate — techno-utopia on one side, existential catastrophe on the other — are mirror images of each other in an important sense: both treat AI as a singular, autonomous force acting upon humanity, rather than as a set of tools and systems whose consequences depend heavily on how they are designed, governed, and applied. This framing is not merely intellectually unsatisfying. It is practically dangerous, because it crowds out the harder, more productive questions.

History offers a useful corrective. Earlier generations faced analogous moments of technological vertigo — the arrival of the automobile, the spread of industrial manufacturing, the rise of networked computing — and the outcomes in each case were shaped far less by the technology itself than by the institutional choices, design decisions, and governance frameworks that surrounded it.

The automobile did not inevitably produce suburban sprawl; rather, suburban sprawl resulted from a combination of (and choice of) specific zoning codes, highway finance policies, and real estate practices, that could have been otherwise. The lesson is not that technology is neutral — it is not — but that its effects are substantially mediated by human choices, and those choices remain open far longer than the determinists on either side would have us believe.

AI is not different in this respect. The 63rd IMCL will proceed from that premise, examining artificial intelligence not as fate but as a design challenge: a set of powerful capabilities that can be directed toward the creation of more livable, humane, and sustainable cities — or away from it.

ABOVE: An urban scheme generated by ChatGPT using traditional patterns for a city in a desert context.

The Frontiers We Will Explore

The conference program reflects the breadth and urgency of those design challenges. Several presentations and workshops will address generative design tools that can accelerate the exploration of urban form, simulate pedestrian movement and microclimate, and help designers navigate complex trade-offs among density, access, and environmental performance.

As AI-assisted planning tools move from research labs into municipal planning departments, design studios, and infrastructure agencies, the governance questions become immediate and practical. Who controls the training data? What values are embedded in the optimization criteria? How do affected communities gain legible, meaningful input into processes that increasingly unfold at machine speed? The conference will create space for rigorous, experience-based exchange on all of these fronts.

Living Structure and the Alexander Legacy

Among the most unique events at this year's conference is a workshop exploring the intersection of Christopher Alexander's foundational ideas and contemporary AI tools. Alexander spent decades developing a rigorous theory of what he called living structure — the quality that distinguishes human environments that genuinely support well-being from those that, however efficient or formally sophisticated, leave their inhabitants alienated and diminished.

In his landmark four-volume work The Nature of Order, Alexander argued that this quality is not merely aesthetic or subjective, but reflects deep structural properties — properties he described in terms of centers, symmetries, and a recursive geometry of wholeness that can be observed, analyzed, and, with discipline and care, deliberately created.

The workshop, titled Living Structure + AI, will ask a deceptively simple question: can computational tools help us identify, measure, and generate these properties at scales and speeds that would be impossible by hand? The question is deceptively simple because Alexander himself was deeply worried about the potential to automate design, wary that algorithmic processes would reproduce the formal abstraction he spent his career critiquing.

On the other hand, Alexander was very excited about the potential of computers to aid humans in generating wholeness in design. In fact, a late project of his was with the University of York, titled "Harmony-Seeking Computations." This suggests he would have been excited about AI's ability to further this work.

The workshop will be co-convened with researchers from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Guangzhou Campus. It will bring together practitioners and theorists to work through both the promise and the limits of this convergence. The workshop will serve, along with other work, as a continuation of the inquiry Alexander began: not a canonization of his conclusions, but a living engagement with his questions.

ABOVE: A new pattern language collection developed in partnership with UN-Habitat and other partners, with an online companion wiki developed by wiki inventor Ward Cunningham, and available at npl.wiki.

Other sessions at the 63rd IMCL will examine a broader range of design methodologies and computational tools — from generative design approaches now reshaping professional practice, to emerging methods for evaluating urban form against evidence-based criteria for human well-being. Alongside these more technology-forward explorations, the conference will also feature sessions grounded in more traditional pattern language methodologies: the use of Alexander's original 253 patterns, and successor pattern languages developed for specific contexts and cultures, as practical instruments for community engagement, neighborhood visioning, and incremental urban repair.

We look forward to seeing you at the conference!

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The 63rd International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference will take place in Riga and Jelgava, Latvia, July 6-10, 2026. The IMCL is hosted by the Lennard Institute for Livable Cities, a nonprofit educational institution with a mission to advance the well-being of people and planet by making more livable, more ecological, and more prosperous cities, towns and suburbs. The IMCL was founded in 1985 by Henry Lennard, a Viennese medical sociologist, and Suzanne Lennard, a British architectural scholar, and conferences have been held across Europe and the USA, bringing together scholars, practitioners and city officials from across the globe.

Here is the flyer for the workshop that will take place as part of the conference (right-click to download):

What Can We Learn from Riga, Latvia, "One of the Top Walkable Cities in Europe"?

The city offers many lessons in shaping streets and paths, "outdoor rooms," and appealing architectural details

ABOVE: Just some of the architectural treasures of Riga, Latvia — in this case, its remarkable collection of Art Nouveau architecture — making it an exemplar case study of walkability.

RIGA, LATVIA - When a city like Riga is named among Europe's most walkable — as was recently the case for Riga by Forbes, Time Out, and others — it is tempting to attribute the recognition to accidents of history. But that would miss the deeper lesson. Walkability — real, lived walkability — is not an accident, but an achievement. It is the outcome of the intentional development of spatial patterns, cultural practices, and institutional frameworks that reinforce one another over time.

For participants in the upcoming IMCL conference (July 6-10), Riga offers something more than a beautiful and inspiring destination — though it certainly is that. It is a working laboratory: a place where we can observe how a city integrates heritage, mobility, public space, and recovery into a coherent urban fabric. In an era defined by disruption — pandemics, geopolitical instability, climate stress — this is precisely the kind of system we need to understand.

ABOVE: Some of Riga's walking delights that we discovered on our preparation trip in February.

The same is true for the nearby city of Jelgava, where we will be gathering at the splendid Jelgava Palace. That city faces different challenges, owing to its near-destruction during World War II, and the construction of Soviet-era buildings that the city is keen to regenerate. The goal is also a more walkable, livable, successful city, and the City is eager to tap into the knowledge and insights of conference participants.

ABOVE: Our conference venue, Jelgava Palace.

Walkability as a Network Property

Too often, "walkability" is reduced to a checklist: wider sidewalks, fewer cars, more crossings. Riga demonstrates a more sophisticated reality. Walkability emerges from a dense network of interconnected places — what might be called a "place network." The city's destinations are close together within a fine-grained urban fabric, diverse in function with shops, housing, and culture interwoven, and visually legible through clear edges, landmarks, and spatial sequences. The result is not simply that one can walk — but that one wants to walk. The city invites exploration through a continuous sequence of spatial rewards. This is precisely the IMCL emphasis in action: cities understood as systems of relationships, not isolated interventions.

ABOVE: Riga's walkability is reinforced by a network of destinations, including the spectacular Central Market, one of Europe's largest (below left and right). The walkable range is extended by a network of convenient transportation choices.

Architecture as Infrastructure

Riga's globally renowned collection of Art Nouveau buildings (photo at top) is often treated as a cultural asset — and it is. But it is also something more fundamental: a form of cognitive and perceptual infrastructure. These buildings exhibit many of the properties identified by Christopher Alexander — hierarchy, symmetry, levels of scale, deep reveals, coherent rhythms — coming together to form an environment that sustains visual interest over long walking distances, providing orientation cues and memorable landmarks, and encouraging lingering, social interaction, and repeated visits. Contrast this with many contemporary environments characterized by what we might call "geometrical fundamentalism" — blank, repetitive, or jagged forms that fail to engage human perceptual systems, actively discouraging walking even when distances are short. In Riga, architectural richness is not an optional aesthetic layer. It is a functional component of walkability itself.

ABOVE: Architectural support for walkability can be seen in the two Riga examples at left - and missing in the two examples at right.

The Continuity of the Public Realm

Another key lesson is the continuity of the public realm. Streets, squares, parks, and waterfronts in Riga are not isolated amenities — they form an integrated system in which green spaces connect seamlessly to urban streets, waterfronts are accessible and inviting, and public squares anchor social and civic life. A choice of convenient and reliable public transportation extends this walkable realm into a "polycentric" city.

This continuity creates an overlapping network of public spaces facilitating social connections, which research has shown is a critical feature for urban resilience. For IMCL attendees focused on the theme of urban recovery, this is not merely an aesthetic observation. Cities that function as connected systems are far better able to adapt than those composed of disconnected fragments.

Time as a Design Partner

Riga's urban fabric is not the product of a single plan or era. It is a layered system, evolving over centuries through incremental adaptation — producing a diversity of building types and uses, flexibility for changing economic conditions, and an embedded cultural memory that no master plan can manufacture. Many modern developments, by contrast, are built as large monolithic projects with limited adaptability. When conditions change, as they inevitably do, these environments struggle to respond. Riga shows the value of what we might call "time as a design partner." Its resilience is inseparable from its capacity to evolve incrementally.

Affordability, Diversity, and the Limits of Success

One of Riga's most consistent recent accolades is its status as a high-value, relatively affordable European destination — one publication calls it "a wildly underrated city" — and this is not incidental to its walkability. Walkable urban environments tend to generate high demand, but if costs rise too steeply, they can undermine their own social and economic diversity. Riga appears, at least for now, to maintain a productive balance: high-quality urban form, relatively accessible costs, and a mix of local and international users that sustains a lively, mixed urban population. For practitioners, the lesson is clear — walkability must be paired with policies that sustain diversity and access, or it risks becoming self-limiting.

ABOVE: Walkability is promoted by subtle shifts of street alignment, producing "deflected views" and teasing interest in what's ahead. It's also enhanced with landmark buildings, like Riga's opera house, the Latvian National Opera (upper left) and the Riga Cathedral, founded in 1211.

A Baltic Case Study in Recovery

Perhaps the most compelling lesson for IMCL attendees lies in Riga's broader regional context. Latvia, like its Baltic neighbors, has undergone profound disruptions — Soviet occupation and centralized planning, economic restructuring after independence, integration into the European Union, and more recent geopolitical tensions. And yet Riga has emerged as a city of increasing stability, attractiveness, and global recognition. This suggests that urban form and public space matter in recovery and ultimate success, and that cultural continuity provides a foundation for resilience. For a conference devoted to regeneration in a time of disruption, Riga is not just an illustrative example — it is a case study actively unfolding before our eyes. And that is especially true in this moment of European and global history, as Europe takes on a stronger leadership role — and that is true for its leadership in livable cities.

An Invitation to Look Closely

For those attending the IMCL conference, Riga and Jelgava offer a rare opportunity: to experience walkability as a lived system rather than an abstract metric, to observe the integration of heritage and contemporary life, and to study how public space networks support urban resilience. Being ranked among Europe's most walkable cities is an achievement — but it is also a signal, pointing to deeper structural qualities that are increasingly recognized as essential for livable, resilient urbanism.

For more information on the IMCL conference, please visit https://www.imcl.online/latvia.

ABOVE: Capping off our preparatory tour at the House of the Blackheads in Riga.

63rd IMCL in Latvia Will Be Another Rich Immersive Experience in the Latest Livable City Developments

The neighboring cities of Riga and Jelgava are fascinating laboratories of emerging global leadership and resilience — offering exactly the kind of firsthand, peer-to-peer learning that has made IMCL conferences a formative experience for urban professionals for four decades

ABOVE: The beautiful venue cities of Riga and Jelgava, Latvia, newly stable and prosperous after centuries of fascinating and sometimes disruptive history.

RIGA, LATVIA - Imagine walking through the streets of Riga's Old Town with a group of colleagues who have spent their careers thinking about exactly what you are seeing — the grain of the streets, the scale of the buildings, the width of pathways, the way people claim and inhabit public space. Someone makes an observation that reframes something you have been wrestling with for months. The conversation continues over dinner, spills into the next morning's session, and by the time you board your flight home, you are carrying not just new ideas but new ways of seeing.

That is what an IMCL conference delivers — and has been since 1985.

The 63rd conference, July 6–10 in Riga and Jelgava, comes at a moment when the theme — Regenerative Architecture and Urbanism: Recovery and Resilience After an Age of Disruption — could not be more precisely matched to its setting. Latvia is one of Europe's remarkable contemporary success stories: a stable, prosperous EU and NATO member that has navigated genuine historical disruption and emerged with extraordinary civic vitality. Riga is an architecturally rich, walkable capital alive with street-level energy. Jelgava, its smaller neighbor, is actively working through the challenges of urban regeneration in real time. Together they form an unusually instructive pair of urban laboratories — the kind of place where theory and practice become impossible to separate.

Workshops and site-based explorations will allow participants to engage directly with both cities, assessing real conditions and proposing actionable strategies in the peer-to-peer tradition that distinguishes IMCL from every other gathering in the field. Immersive workshops on real challenges will deepen the content of plenary and breakout content, as well as local study tours. The goal, as always, is not abstract discussion but practical insight that participants can take home and apply.

The accepted abstracts reflect the full scope of the challenges all cities face right now:

Regenerative Urbanism and Climate Resilience — Regenerative zoning, adaptive reuse, stormwater and flood resilience, urban heat and gendered vulnerability, African vernacular climate adaptation, geothermal and energy-efficient housing, fractal urbanism, and green-integrated mobility corridors.

Community Engagement, Equity, Affordability, and Social Infrastructure — Participatory planning, children as urban users, civic living labs, community-led urban recovery, farm worker housing, supportive housing, public markets as civic infrastructure, protest-friendly urban design, and micro-actions for community health.

Walkability, Mobility, and Multimodal Transportation — Pedestrian infrastructure, accessible network analysis, cycling wayfinding, transit-oriented development, the 15-minute city, multimodal transport paradigms, and street liveability methodology.

Heritage, Cultural Identity, and Urban Form — Historic preservation, DNA of place, cultural continuity and urban identity, Soviet and post-Soviet urbanism, post-war reconstruction, heritage building restoration, architectural sculpture, and building façade design.

Neuroscience, Well-being, and the Human Experience of Place — Neuroaesthetics and beauty, biophilic design, neurourbanism and citizen science, VR in urban research and memory, fractal pattern perception, lifecycle urbanism, and the psychosocial dimensions of space.

Urban Design Theory, Policy, and Practice — Pattern languages, Christopher Alexander and timeless building principles, regenerative and resilient architecture, tax increment financing, smart city metrics, digital civic engagement, suburban downtown revitalization, and urban fabric repair.

What distinguishes an IMCL gathering is not simply the exchange of the latest ideas, but the depth of engagement with place, people, and practice. The informal conversations, the shared meals, the impromptu debates on a street corner — the moment when something you have been thinking about abstractly suddenly becomes legible in the grain of a real place — these are returns on investment that no amount of screen time can replicate.

This is precisely the kind of moment when that investment matters most. Cities everywhere are navigating converging pressures — environmental, social, technological, political. The professionals who will lead the response are the ones who stay engaged, who show up, who do the hard work of learning from each other and from places that have something genuine to teach.

Riga and Jelgava have that. IMCL will draw it out. We hope to see you there!

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The IMCL conferences were begun in 1985 by Henry Lennard, a Viennese medical sociologist, and Suzanne Crowhurst Lennard, a British architectural scholar, passionate about sharing the latest and most advanced knowledge about how to make cities more livable — healthier and more ecological, prosperous, just and beautiful. More information about the 63rd IMCL conference, and a link to register, can be found at https://www.imcl.online/latvia