Journal of the American Planning Association

AI and the Future of Urban Planning

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping the conditions under which planners work, the data they rely on, and the decisions they help make. Large language models (LLMs), generative AI, machine learning, and computer vision have moved quickly from research environments into planning practice. Planning agencies and consultants are increasingly experimenting with AI-enabled tools to draft plans, summarize public comments, screen development applications, generate scenarios, automate analysis, and support public communication. At the same time, vendors are bringing AI-enabled products to market faster than the profession can fully evaluate their implications for planning processes, governance, and decision-making.

Yet whether AI will ultimately improve planning, distort it, or simply reproduce existing problems in new forms remains an open question. While AI systems demonstrate increasingly versatile capabilities across a wide range of planning-related tasks, planning itself remains fundamentally complex, contested, contextual, and place-based. Planning decisions cannot be fully reduced to the optimization problems that many generic AI systems are designed to address. Contemporary Generative AI systems increasingly produce text, recommendations, classifications, and synthesized judgments that may augment, substitute for, or distort professional judgment at the core of planning practice. These challenges underscore the need for an emerging "AI for Planning" agenda. Rather than treating AI as a generic technological solution applied to planning problems, an AI for Planning perspective asks how AI systems should be designed, evaluated, governed, and integrated in ways that reflect the epistemic, institutional, spatial, and normative realities of planning itself.

This special issue seeks to advance that conversation by bringing together diverse perspectives on how AI may reshape planning theory, practice, governance, and professional institutions over the coming decade. We particularly encourage submissions from practitioner-academic collaborations, research grounded in direct engagement with planning agencies, professional organizations, or policy actors, and contributions from international scholars to advance a globally informed conversation on the future of AI in urban planning. JAPA's readership includes practitioners, and the special issue should reflect that.

We welcome submissions that address topics including, but not limited to:

• AI in planning practice and decision-making, including how AI is changing what planners do and with what consequences for planning processes, plans, and communities.
• Governance, regulation, professional standards, and AI literacy in planning, including questions of transparency, accountability, procurement, liability, due process, public trust, and the professional competencies and institutional capacities needed for the responsible use and governance of AI systems.
• Planning judgment and AI, including where AI may improve, distort, or displace professional judgment, and how planners can evaluate these differences.
• Equity, participation, and public engagement, including how AI affects representation, procedural justice, accessibility, and the distribution of benefits and harms across communities.
• Spatial, environmental, and economic implications of AI-related infrastructure, including data centers, energy demand, water use, land-use conflicts, and regional development impacts.
• Conceptual and agenda-setting contributions toward an "AI for Planning" framework, including how planning theory, institutions, and governance can shape the development of planning-centered AI systems rather than simply adapting generic technologies to planning tasks.

Out of Scope

This special issue is not interested in papers that benchmark AI model performance or apply AI methods without clear engagement with planning questions and contexts; that focus primarily on classroom pedagogy; or that present generic smart-city arguments without critically examining the specific role of AI in planning. We also discourage submissions that treat AI as a settled rather than evolving and contested technology