A planner’s guide to the coming AI realignment: ten speculations about how artificial intelligence will change U.S. cities, urban economies, automobile use, suburban housing, and the practice of city planning

Whether it is reviewing proposals for new data centers, dealing with the fallout from AI-related job losses, updating current forecasts and plans to reflect AI’s myriad economic and community development impacts, creating and using AI models to improve planning practice, or coping with the effects of potential AI bias, like it or not, planners and planning departments will be at the forefront of the AI revolution. Except that it will not be a revolution in the sense that revolutions are defined as fundamental and sudden changes in the existing political, economic, social, or cultural order. At least at the local level, what is more likely is a gradual realignment of tasks, employment opportunities, and economic and institutional relationships in response to AI’s ability to bring an immense amount of information to bear on any job or issue. This article does not pretend to know how the future of AI and related technologies will ultimately shake out. Instead, it offers a series of medium-term speculations about how AI is likely to affect cities, urban economies, suburban housing, urban transportation systems, and local government planning. These speculations draw on history, theory, and, where available, place-level data and models. Organized as a series of ten questions and corresponding responses, this article aims to guide urban planning practitioners and researchers as they wrestle with the uncertainties of being caught up in a society-level tsunami of technical change for which existing paradigms and procedures offer little guidance.