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):