Urban design professionals have offered their views on what lies ahead for the property industry.
Julian Bolleter may be keenly aware of the opportunities technology can offer designers and planners but he’s certainly not ignoring the possible threats.
At a recent event in Perth, the director of the Australian Urban Design Research Centre at The University of Western Australia shared his insights into the impact of artificial intelligence on the town planning industry.
As part of a panel discussion featuring Curtin University’s Claudia Westermann, Chris Kueh from Edith Cowan University, GHD circular economy lead Huia Adkins, HIP V. HYPE’s Simon Blackwell and multidisciplinary artist Ilona McGuire, Dr Bolleter spoke about his experience running a master’s program in urban design and cities.
“I’m pretty worried, to be honest,” he told attendees at the opening night of this year’s Perth Design Week.
“The way we design currently is fairly mechanical … I’m afraid I don’t think there’s much there that AI couldn’t do now, let alone in the future.
“Spatial design is often, in some respects, not that complicated. It’s arranging blocks on a plan, so that really worries me.”
Dr Bolleter highlighted the possibility designers might switch off when working alongside machines.
“We’re seeing that happening,” he said.
“I would totally imagine a designer confronting an AI system that has generated 500 schemes for a particular site based on the site, proportions, area, climate, geology, density, codings, whatever you want, will spit out all kinds of iterations.
“What worries me is we’ll then just switch off, we’ll be then reduced to being in a reviewer mode.”
Dr Bolleter then posed a thoughtprovoking question: “are we the agent of AI, or is the AI the agent of us?”
On a brighter note, he said the complexity of cities stemmed from the human experience interacting with the mechanistic form of a city.
“I think we need to do what AI cannot do,” Dr Bolleter told the forum.
“It [AI] cannot have an embodied experience of city, in all the human complexity, the way we engage in space and interact with other people in space, and that is what we need to be masters of.
“We need to be able to stay ahead of the machine in terms of doing what it can’t do.”
Dr Bolleter, who has published books about urban planning in Australian cities, said urban designers needed to recognise their strengths and weaknesses when it came to competing with AI.
“We have to be cognisant and clear headed enough to admit our losses in the areas we’re not going to be able to compete in, and we need to capitalise where we can compete,” he said.
“This is not going to be easy; this is going to be a really difficult process to stay ahead of the machine.”
Decarbonisation
Simon Blackwell, associate at national property development and sustainability firm HIP V. HYPE, spoke about what the industry needed to do to reduce its carbon footprint.
He said it was important to move beyond the concept of net zero to a net-positive mindset in the built environment.
In other words, we should harness the potential of buildings to remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than they emit.
To achieve that, he said, the industry needed to make some key shifts.
Mr Blackwell said operational carbon – emissions generated by a building’s use – was far less of an issue than the carbon stored within buildings, known as embodied carbon.
“The operational carbon side of things will solve itself,” he said.
“The grid is decarbonising; maybe not as fast as you’d like it to, but that’s almost a problem you don’t worry about any more as designers.
“I think embodied carbon is now emerging as more of a significant issue to solve.
“On the operational carbon part, one thing we do need to do immediately as a lever is get off gas so the electrification of buildings is a non-negotiable.
“That, combined with the decarbonisation of the grid, solves the operational carbon side of things, which then just leaves the not very small problem of embodied carbon.”
