How AI Sees the City

Fábio Duarte is a principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Associate Director, Research & Design, of the MIT Senseable City Lab. Duarte has been a consultant for the World Bank in urban planning and mobility. Duarte’s books include Unplugging the City (Routledge, 2018), and Urban Play (MIT Press, 2021).Martina Mazzarello is a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Lead of MIT Senseable City Lab global initiatives. Mazzarello has exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and has published in journals such as Scientific Reports, Nature Computational Science, and Nature Water. Fan Zhang is an assistant professor at the Peking University Institute of Remote Sensing and GIS. Zhang has been awarded as one of the Geospatial World 50 Rising Stars Zhang has published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cities, and Nature Climate Change.Carlo Ratti is a professor of the practice at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founder and Director of the MIT Senseable City Lab, and distinguished professor at the Politecnico di Milano. Ratti has been the curator of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, and is the author of the Atlas of the Senseable City Lab (Yale Press, 2023).

“In this fascinating book, Duarte, Mazzarello, Zhang, and Ratti bring together a wide array of computational techniques that enable us to produce new insights into the way we build cities and how we might improve their designs in the new world which is being built around the digital domain. In the last decade, there has been a flurry of developments in urban design based on articulating how we can understand the way we mold our physical environment by bringing together a very diverse array of data that determines their quality. This book shows how we are beginning to interpret the world of urban design, suggesting ways in which we might improve design using urban analytics, AI and large language models.”Michael Batty, University College London“Artificial intelligence promises to be the most powerful force ever to shape cities—potentially surpassing the automobile, electric power, and the digital revolution itself. AI is already changing how cities are designed, measured, and governed through its ability to read and make visible patterns in streets, buildings, and urban life that were previously invisible at scale. Drawing on groundbreaking work from the MIT Senseable City Lab, How AI Sees the City is the first book to explain this monumental transformation—and why it will define the urban century ahead.”Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class

• Introduction: A Walk Through Cambridge, Massachusetts 1. Visual Approaches to the City from Ancient Rome to MIT 2. The Digital Image 3. Using AI to Interpret the Image 4. Visual AI in the City 5. Visual AI Indoors 6. Visual AI and the Individual 7. Eyes on the City: Visual Intelligence and Surveillance 8. Generative AI and the City 9. Words and Images Work Together 10. Conclusion: Urban Visual Intelligence in the Future