Generative AI Meets Future Cities: Towards an Era of Autonomous Urban Intelligence

As cities evolve into complex, data-rich ecosystems, urban planning is undergoing a fundamental reinvention. Recent breakthroughs in generative AI, such as large language models and diffusion models, are redefining how cities can be conceived, simulated, and optimized through autonomous generation rather than manual blueprinting. In this article, we introduce the concept of Autonomous Urban Intelligence (AUI) and review recent advances in generative AI for automated urban planning along its technological trajectory. Building on these developments, we envision the future of urban planning as a conversation-based human–AI co-creation framework, in which planners engage in continuous dialogue with generative models to iteratively refine and optimize urban designs. This framework transforms urban planning into a living and adaptive process that integrates human creativity with machine intelligence. We hope that this perspective will help readers understand the emerging trend of AI-driven urbanism and inspire further exploration toward the next frontier of automated, intelligent, and sustainable city planning.