Table of contents for N. 132 in Topos

Oh, hi there! I’m topos, the leading international magazine for urban planning from Munich, Germany. For me, everything revolves around the sustainable city of the future. Online, I spend 365 days a year dealing with the question: how will we live sustainably, healthily and technologized in the world’s future metropolises? In addition to my home www.toposmagazine.com, I am published four times a year as a print magazine (that’s what you are holding in your hands right now!). I address everyone who is interested in the smarter, greener city of the future and who works in, on and with the city. My readers include CEOs, mayors, architects, landscape architects, urban planners, engineers, digitalization specialists, researchers – simply everyone that is interested in urban development! My great passion is finding and analyzing…

This is not an insight into the chat history between two people, as you may have already guessed. It might not be the first time that the author of this text has spoken to a tree – she may have tried it before as a child when playing – but it is definitely her first online chat with a tree. And the first time that the tree has responded. This conversation takes place across borders, via a browser on the internet. At the time of the conversation in the summer of 2025, the silver birch (Betula pendula) stands on the grounds of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in southwest London, directly on the banks of the Thames. The author sits at a desk in Germany and asks the tree how…

Educated in the UK, Thomas studied architecture at Oxford Brookes University before earning a Master of Architecture from the University of Liverpool. His early professional years included experience in Hong Kong, where he became a registered architect (RIBA), and in London, where he worked with firms like Aedas and Front Inc. At Front, a consultancy known for complex geometry and digital fabrication, he contributed to projects such as the Morpheus Hotel by Zaha Hadid Architects – a role that sharpened his focus on the interface between design intent and construction logic. Although details of his individual contributions are not officially confirmed, his trajectory reflects a deep engagement with computational tooling from early on. Until early 2024, Thomas held the position of Design Technology Manager at BIG’s London office, where he…

Images that accompany the global AI debate are often futuristic, depicting robots, metropolises full of sensors and autonomous vehicles. Cities such as San Francisco, Shanghai and Seoul are renowned for their digital innovation. However, a closer look reveals a quieter, more profound change on the edge of the Baltic Sea. Helsinki has become a pioneer of urban artificial intelligence – not through spectacle, but through systems. Rather than using AI to demonstrate technical dominance, the Finnish capital is using it as an intelligent tool to improve the organisation of administration, citizen participation, urban design and public welfare. While other cities focus primarily on technological progress, Helsinki takes a holistic, often social approach, asking: How can AI improve quality of life, strengthen participation, and enable a sustainable, trust-based approach to technology?…

They called it resilience. Smart upgrades, urban twins, central dashboards – a neat stack of dashboards to monitor the state of our cities. Carbon emissions, traffic flows, weather patterns, even citizen satisfaction – all nicely visualised, optimised and predicted. And yet, it took exactly three clicks – well placed, well timed – to plunge half a city into heat and silence. It happened in Baltimore, in 2019. In Atlanta, the year before. In Düsseldorf, where a ransomware attack rerouted ambulances during a pandemic. And more than once in Ukraine, where the power grid went dark under the fingers of ghostly scripts. We used to speak of hacking as a threat to data. Now, it is a threat to hospitals, trains and electricity. To the very operating system of our urban…

It speaks fluently now – this thing we still call artificial intelligence, though the term has long since outgrown its own definition. It drafts our emails, draws our buildings, answers our questions before we’ve finished asking them. Sometimes it lies. Sometimes it hallucinates. Always, it responds. And that, of course, is the seduction. This issue of topos does not celebrate AI. Nor does it warn you off. It does something more dangerous: it takes the machine seriously. For the urbanist, the architect, the planner, the administrator of increasingly digitalised complexity, AI is no longer a speculative force. It is embedded – silently and exponentially – in everything from traffic modulation to zoning simulation, from energy grids to civic chatbots. The city, once a physical terrain of political decision and social…

THERESA RAMISCH studied Urban Planning at the TU Munich. She began working as an editor for G+L and topos in 2016. Since 2021, she has been Editor in Chief for G+L – the leading German magazine for Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning. Since 2023, she has also been Editor in Chief for topos. Oil has made the Arabian Peninsula wealthy, but this source of income will eventually run dry. For this reason, Saudi Arabia has been pursuing plans for years to establish new revenue streams; a major focus being artificial intelligence, including the flagship project Oxagon, which is a subproject of the vast urban development Neom. Neom is considered one of the world’s most expensive construction undertakings. Estimated costs for the megaproject vary significantly, but are believed to range from…

As the southern terminus of the Grand Canal, the longest artificial waterway in the world connecting the city to Beijing, Hangzhou has been in sustained contact with the north for centuries. As a result, Hangzhou became a major hub for trade and culture. From the 1950s onwards, the city initially underwent strong industrial development. Road construction and new districts expanded rapidly, but at the same time a shift in thinking began: the city not only started to protect traditional landscape elements such as the West Lake area, but also to revitalise them as an identity-forming core. That early choice still shapes the cityscape. Pagodas, gardens and lakeside promenades are a key part of the metropolitan fabric, because West Lake was deliberately integrated into urban planning and treated as a cultural…

Born in Shanghai in 1960, Siegfried Zhiqiang Wu’s education at Tongji University and later at the Technical University of Berlin established a foundation that blended Eastern and Western approaches to urban theory. His doctoral research focused on the globalisation of metropolitan regions, foreshadowing his later interest in system complexity and transnational planning frameworks. Returning to China in the 1990s, Wu rose to senior academic and administrative roles at Tongji, including dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Planning and later vice president. His leadership fostered international exchange and academic innovation, though claims that he founded Tongji’s College of Design and Innovation are inaccurate – Prof. Lou Yongqi is formally credited with that role. Outside academia, Wu has advised the Shanghai Municipal Government and holds membership in both the Chinese…

Theresa Ramischstudied Urban Planning at the TU Munich. She began working as an editor for G+L and topos in 2016. Since 2021, she has been Editor in Chief for G+L – the leading German magazine for Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning. Since 2023, she has also been Editor in Chief for topos. t.ramisch@georg-media.de Anna Breitfussis studying Media and Communications in Munich and has been supporting the editorial team at Georg Media as a working student since September 2024. Originally coming from a working background in the health sector, she likes to face challenges and explore new topics. a.breitfuss@georg-media.de Julia Maria Kornstudied art history, archaeology, and history in Bonn. She joined the team at Georg Media at the beginning of 2024 and is primarily responsible for Restauro magazine. j.korn@georg-media.de Anna Martinstudied…

Not long ago, a colleague asked me – half serious, half drunk on future euphoria – “Do you think AI will soon design entire cities?” I replied, deadpan, “Only if you want every street to feel like a perfectly organised supermarket aisle – efficient, but utterly soulless.” And that, in a nutshell, is the conversation we need to be having. Yes, AI can do a lot. An astonishing amout. And it’s getting better every day. But what it cannot (yet) do – and perhaps never should – is fully understand, feel, or responsibly shape the layered complexity of human environments. Right now, we’re in the middle of a full-blown AI euphoria. Planning firms run generative models on city layouts, landscape architects let neural networks dream up parks that flirt with…

Let’s be honest: no civilisation in history has been so pathologically afraid of its own progress as 21st-century Europe. A continent that once launched the Renaissance, split the atom, and gave the world Bauhaus now trembles at the mere mention of a machine learning model. Artificial Intelligence – arguably the most promising technological breakthrough since electricity – is met not with ambition or excitement, but with bureaucratic dread, academic foot-dragging, and the mother of all regulatory frameworks: the “German Angst”, which is now increasingly becoming “European Angst”. Let’s be clear. The European AI Act, for example, is not just cautious – it’s neurotic. Designed under the pretext of human dignity and safety, it betrays a deeper pathology: a collective Western panic in the face of exponential technological change. While American…

This article is a deep dive into how AI is changing urban planning, from zoning to citizen engagement, from traffic simulations to ethical conundrums. But don’t worry – this isn’t a techutopian monologue. We stay firmly on the ground (preferably landscaped), unpacking the biases, the black boxes, and the bureaucratic joys of algorithmic accountability. What emerges is not fear or fascination, but a new professional frontier: one where planners must learn to navigate not just streets and districts, but datasets and neural networks. So, before your next neighbourhood consultation is run by a chatbot – or worse, your design gets auto-optimised into a concrete nightmare – read on. This is your witty, well-informed guide to the promises, puzzles, and urban poetry of planning with AI. Welcome to the augmented polis…

Tim Fu studied Architectural Science at Toronto Metropolitan University before continuing at the Architectural Association in London, where he immersed himself in computational design. These academic years were shaped by a growing interest in how digital tools could stretch architectural form. This mindset carried over into his work at Zaha Hadid Architects, particularly within its research group ZHCODE. There, Fu deepened his understanding of algorithmic geometry, exploring how form-finding processes and new digital workflows might inform future building design. From ZHA to Studio Tim Fu In 2023, Fu launched his own practice, Studio Tim Fu, with the explicit aim of exploring AI’s architectural potential. The studio positions itself as an experimental platform working at the edge of image generation, spatial logic, and computational ideation. Fu frequently emphasises a “human-in-the-loop” approach:…

Carlo Ratti’s academic path laid the foundation for his interdisciplinary approach. After studying engineering and architecture in Turin and Paris, he completed both an MPhil and a PhD at the University of Cambridge. A Fulbright scholarship then brought him to MIT, where he went on to found the Senseable City Lab in 2004 – a research initiative that quickly gained visibility for treating urban environments as complex, data-driven systems. In parallel, Ratti established the design and innovation office Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA), which today operates as both a design studio and a research extension of the lab’s ideas. At the core of Ratti’s philosophy is a desire to reframe how we interpret and intervene in urban systems. Rather than viewing cities solely through infrastructure or zoning codes, his work treats…

It begins, as most illusions do, with a promise: that artificial intelligence will render our urban lives frictionless, our decisions rational, and our futures optimised. The AI-infused city is now a fixture of every planning pitch, policy paper and start-up deck. Smart mobility, predictive maintenance, participatory governance – all supposedly just an algorithm away. But behind the polished surfaces of chat interfaces and design generators lies a less presentable reality. A reality fuelled by indiscriminate data extraction, structural opacity, planetary-scale energy consumption and bias at industrial scale. AI, for all its transformative potential, is not an ethereal intelligence. It is an infrastructure – hungry, imprecise and far from neutral. Let us take a closer look at the cost of this new machine logic. Not the financial one, which is considerable,…