In the future, computer programs will do all of our city planning for us. With an immaculately detailed set of established parameters, an elaborately coded piece of software will allow us to simply press ‘Enter’, and we’ll be able to build an automatically generated ‘Pixel City’. See, this guy already did it two years ago (via Beyond the Beyond):
It only took him 50 hours to code the entire city, and about 5 seconds for the computer to create it.
Videos by VICE
Okay, so I for one don’t want to live in that city — look at the traffic! And of course I’m kidding about automatically generated cities — though it might be a fun contest for programmers, city planners, and architects to collaborate on: Who can build the most appealing program for creating automatically generated cities?
As in, who can build a program that spits out an efficient, sustainable, and livable city with just a keystroke? Perhaps the contestants would want to enlist the aid of this gentleman — the Sim City mastermind who ‘beat’ an unbeatable game by creating the most efficient city humanly possible. Watch:
And there’s no doubt a role to be played by software in the future of city planning — Betaville, a program that allows residents to vote on scheduled projects in their neighborhood, brings urban planning into new, more democratic territory. And existing programs are routinely employed to allow planners to model various developments. So while automatically generated cities may be a fantasy (and, I suppose, relatively pointless), we can certainly expect continually improving software to continue to increase its role in the city-making process.
