Urban planning has always evolved alongside technology, society and the way we live. But in recent years, the pace of change has accelerated.
From artificial intelligence and new mobility systems, to shifting urban form and renewed focus on human wellbeing, planners are navigating a rapidly changing landscape.
For this article, Rebekah, from our research team, explores six emerging forces shaping the future of cities and planning practice. Together these six trends reveal a profession that is becoming more data-informed, more collaborative, and more focused on creating places that genuinely support people and communities.
1. Data-Driven Planning and Artificial Intelligence
Big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence were once predicted to fundamentally change the way we practice urban planning and design. These predictions extended to imagining automated assessment processes, capturing data to model and track urban life using smart city modelling, and theorising tools that could help the community take part in shaping designs.
However, in more recent years AI and data-driven systems have evolved beyond analytic tools into generative and assistive technologies that are increasingly embedded into everyday planning practice. They have been instrumental in efficient data collection and analysis, and the generation of written content and visual material. This has highlighted the growing importance of including human judgment in artificial creation - a.k.a. keeping the “human loop”. From navigating the actual and political environment, ensuring accuracy of data, and considering impacts on amenity as humans feel it, to addressing ethical implications in decision-making, the expertise and judgement of planners and urban designers has never been more critical.
While automated assessment technologies have progressed, they are not yet standard practice in Western Australia. This raises an important question: what opportunities are we missing by not integrating these tools more fully into our planning systems? And how can we, as the people guiding the technology, refine and excel in our unique capabilities?
As AI capabilities continue to evolve, planning frameworks and systems will need to adapt to unlock their full potential. This could include:
- improving how planning information is structured and accessed digitally
- enabling automated assessment systems
- expanding adaptive engagement and consultation technologies.
These changes have the potential to make planning processes more transparent, inclusive and responsive, but they also require careful attention to governance, accountability and accuracy.
AI is already influencing planning. The question is how urban designers and planners will shape its use moving forward to deliver better planning outcomes. The challenge is how they will balance the human and machine in the face of a very human city.
2. Future Mobility
Evolving personal and mass transport options are rapidly changing how we understand urban mobility, with wide-reaching implications for spatial planning, regulation, and the detailed design of our city spaces. Examples include:
- growth in micromobility options such as e-scooters and bikes
- the rise of autonomous vehicles
- increasing uptake of electric vehicles
- changing street design to support shared and flexible use
- shifts in travel behaviour driven by remote work and online services
Once rare, electric vehicles, autonomous transport options, and micromobility are now common features of urban environments. These shifts are changing how planners approach street design—creating streets that support multiple modes of movement while also including spaces for rest, interaction and community life.
Further afield, autonomous vehicles are being introduced to freight industries for long-haul deliveries, where they offer greater efficiency, reliability, and control in logistical operations. The first trials of semi-autonomous and driverless trucks are being held on Australia’s long, flat stretches of open road with relatively predictable road and weather conditions – the ideal environment for experimenting with semi-autonomous technology. These trials are more than experiments for vehicles and logistics; they’re an indication of the changes we’ll see in the way we design and care for freight routes, regional roads, and their interface with metropolitan areas.
At the same time as these carefully controlled trials take place, the chaotic uptake of personal micro-mobility in cities has outpaced the regulations around them. Small, personal electric vehicles like e-scooters, e-bikes, and electric skateboards are reshaping how people encounter each other in public space and how they negotiate sharing it – sometimes with extreme consequences.
Mobility is not constrained to neat patterns. New technologies are redefining relationships between movement, space and urban life at a pace planners need to keep up with to understand how cities and regions function in a rapidly changing world.
3. New Urban Morphology
Since 2021, urban morphology has evolved in ways that both confirm and refine earlier projections of more compact, connected and mixed urban growth. The current impression of the ideal urban form is moulded by sustainability and climate-resilience objectives, and post-COVID recovery. These form the contemporary basis for design and planning theories like the Network City and 15-minute City frameworks, which have their morphological roots in much older, time-tested development patterns. The urban form functions with a lot of complexity in practice. Density alone does not guarantee vibrancy or liveability; instead, outcomes are strongly shaped by good street connections, spatial structure and a mix of land uses.
In Perth, development still reflects its historic pattern – a continued spread outward from the city fringe, with a few pockets of densification around activity centres. The outward expansion of Perth’s housing supply and development conflicts with objectives to build denser, more convenient urban cores, and forces us to imagine a new urban form that balances multiple competing, viciously complex issues.
4. Agile Cities
The accelerating rate of change in the world, combined with increased global competition for talent and resources, will require planners, the planning system, and entire cities to be more agile in their response to evolving challenges. This includes proactive responses to sustainability and project viability, the demands of regulatory processes, and more local, community-led efforts to make tangible, practical improvements to the places they live.
Part of the response to a need for agility includes reforming the planning system to streamline development. This is already being implemented with some hiccups and additional constraints along the way. The need comes from a recognition that ultimately practical solutions rather than arguments over theoretical utopias will be what brings tangible progress that people can understand, live with, and grow from.
Agile planning can happen at every level – it’s the ability to act as an individual, community, city, and state with competence, practicality, and care, and make a change.
5. People-Centred Planning & Design
In an increasingly automated and inauthentic world, cities risk losing their human connection with citizens. People-centred planning and place design will be an essential counterbalance to these forces to ensure physical and mental well-being is upheld as the highest ideal of urban planning (eg. focus on citizen well-being; reducing isolation as a result of “online life”; need for authentic place creation to challenge monotony of pre-fabricated and/or modular design).
In the past few years, the importance of human-centred design frameworks that promote resilience, wellbeing, and connection has only increased.
Loneliness and disconnection have a tangible and severe impact on well-being. Urban places can support opportunities to find in-person connections and support. From pedestrian-friendly places and communal spaces, to design details like the width of pathways and the depths of seats, there are many conditions that have a tangible impact on how people feel connected and interact in their neighbourhoods.
Urban planning practices shape the way people interact and integrate by building effective and good spaces at all scales that cater to human needs and interests. Ultimately, healthy societies are given space to grow and develop through these spaces, and the way they are designed to relate to each other.
Jan Gehl reminds us that good design goes -
“First life, then spaces, then buildings. The other way around never works.” – Jan Gehl
6. Seeing is Believing
A revolution in the visualisation of development proposals and strategic planning outcomes will break down barriers between built-environment professionals and lay-persons as the wider community’s ability to comprehend proposals creates a more engaged and empowered citizenry (e.g. virtual/augmented reality to shape consideration, collaborative design and visualisation in real time).
The ease of visualising proposals using AI tools has allowed almost instant adaptations to design concepts to be shared with project teams, clients, and the public. Rapid development of concepts and streamlined processes using AI have accelerated the design process and allowed designers to explore multiple creative concepts and opportunities in a fraction of the time. While the technology exists and is easily applicable once learned, its use in planning practice is somewhat rare, with practitioners generally relying on traditional methods. As the function becomes more well-practiced, it is likely to become a staple tool to shape early design concepts, guide delivery, and ensure understanding at each phase.
Conclusion
Each trend reshapes planning in a different way, but they share a common understanding: cities are becoming more complex and interconnected, and the uniquely human character of them is becoming increasingly vital.
For planners, the challenge is not simply keeping pace with new technologies or ideas, but integrating them thoughtfully into the systems and places we shape every day. By combining emerging tools with strong professional judgement and collaboration, planning can continue to deliver places that respond to both the responsibilities and opportunities of the future.
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