Artificial Intelligence and New Urban planning: Interpretative Paradigms and Impacts on Urban and Territorial Systems

Given the current widespread development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it is now necessary, in all fields of human activity, to study in depth the characteristics, reasoning processes, and actual potential of different Large Language Models (LLM) in order to determine and verify their effective support for humans. Relying uncritically on digital agents can lead to incorrect decisions or outcomes that harm the community. The uncritical “admiration” of the “plausible” answers provided by artificial reasoners may generate new, altered, and potentially dangerous relational dynamics, as observed in the growing use of affective chatbots. In this period of change, scholars from every research field, including experts on urban phenomena, are called to promptly undertake three activities: to understand and formalize the impacts of AI on urban and territorial systems by redefining the systemic interpretive paradigm and evaluating potential transformations of the subsystem components; to prefigure a new governance process for urban and territorial transformations, considering the appropriate and verified adoption of AI in the individual phases and in the prefiguration of planning scenarios for anthropogenic settlements; to promptly analyze the “weights” and the energy-ethical, and socio-environmental implications of the new data-processing megastructures (data centers) indispensable for the development of LLMs. Along these three lines of reflection, comparisons and debates among urban planners should be organized, in light of the transformations already underway in many territories worldwide. The paper offers reflections on these three topics that contribute to defining a new dimension in the management of urban and territorial transformations, in which the human agent appropriately adopts, drives, and validates the support that new digital agents and artificial reasoners can provide to the discipline.