Articles
Urban Development
January 13, 2025
Sofia Malmsten
CEO & Architect
The challenges facing municipalities today—urbanization, climate change, and increasing demands for sustainable growth—require smarter, faster, and more adaptable planning solutions. Traditional workflows, reliant on manual processes and isolated tools, often fall short of meeting these evolving needs. Enter AI and generative design—a transformative combination that empowers municipalities to revolutionize how urban planning is done.
Generative design uses advanced algorithms to automatically generate and evaluate a vast number of design solutions based on input data, constraints, and objectives. In the context of urban planning, this means analyzing factors like zoning regulations, green space requirements, sunlight exposure, and economic feasibility to produce optimized layouts.
Unlike traditional methods, which may take months to iterate, generative design can generate and refine hundreds of scenarios in minutes, enabling data-driven decision-making at unprecedented speeds.
Generative design offers significant benefits for municipalities and urban planners, making it an essential tool for tackling modern urban challenges:
• Accelerated Planning: What used to take weeks or months—evaluating land use, zoning constraints, and development feasibility—can now be achieved in a fraction of the time.
• Smarter Resource Allocation: Generative design optimizes land use, infrastructure, and green spaces, ensuring no square meter goes to waste.
• Enhanced Sustainability: Environmental factors like carbon footprints, energy efficiency, and biodiversity are integrated from the start, ensuring greener urban solutions.
• Flexibility for Change: The tool’s adaptability means municipalities can respond quickly to updated regulations, shifting community needs, or environmental challenges.
• Citizen Engagement: Visualizing multiple design options empowers municipalities to involve citizens in the decision-making process, building trust and transparency.
Eslöv Municipality recently tested generative design to optimize a key urban development project. The site, a centrally located plot, posed several challenges: contextual factors, the need for housing expansion, and preserving community-focused green spaces.
1. Reach 600 living units and 5 floors on average.
2. Align with surrounding building height and noise reduction regulations near a railway on the eastern side of the plot.
3. Deliver a financially viable and socially sustainable development.
Using Hektar AI, the municipality input site-specific data, including:
• Zoning regulations and height restrictions.
• Target FAR (Floor area ratio) and target number of units
• Wanted typologies (Quarter structure, lamella structure or point house structure)
Within minutes, generative design produced over 200 design scenarios, each evaluated against key criteria such as social accessibility, environmental sustainability, and financial return. In the end we selected 3 interesting options to evaluate deeper.
By leveraging generative design, Eslöv Municipality not only saved hours of planning time but also delivered a solution that engaged multiple stakeholders and sparked meaningful discussions. Below are the three selected options and their KPIs.
Implementing generative design may seem daunting, but the process is more accessible than ever thanks to modern tools and platforms. Here’s how municipalities can begin:
1. Define Objectives: Identify the project’s primary goals, such as optimizing land use, meeting sustainability targets, or increasing housing capacity.
2. Collect Accurate Data: Gather all necessary data, including zoning maps, environmental constraints, and demographic trends.
3. Choose the Right Tool: Platforms like Hektar AI offer intuitive solutions tailored to urban planning, enabling users to input data and generate optimized designs quickly.
4. Engage the Community: Use visualizations from generative design to present scenarios to citizens and gather their feedback.
5. Train Your Team: Equip planning teams with the knowledge to use generative design tools effectively, ensuring seamless integration into workflows.
Generative design is more than a tool—it’s a paradigm shift for municipalities aiming to create smarter, more sustainable cities. By automating complex calculations and offering data-driven insights, generative design enables planners to balance economic growth, environmental stewardship, and community needs.
The case of Eslöv Municipality demonstrates how municipalities can harness this technology to achieve remarkable results, from optimizing housing density to preserving green spaces. As AI and generative design tools continue to evolve, their potential to reshape urban planning will only grow.
For municipalities ready to embrace innovation, the question is no longer if but how fast they can adopt generative design to lead the way in sustainable and efficient city planning.
