Semantic Intelligence and Urban Futures

Semantic City Planning Systems (SCPS), as presented by von Richthofen et al., signify a paradigmatic shift in urban planning by employing Semantic Web Technologies (SWT) to bridge fragmented urban knowledge across domains and disciplines, thus offering a more integrated, dynamic, and evidence-based planning methodology centred on four meta-practices—representational, evaluative, projective and synthetical, where each captures essential planning modalities from visualisation and assessment to envisioning and data synthesis; the paper meticulously maps how SWT—from linked data and RDF triples to ontologies and knowledge graphs—enable machine-readable urban models, allowing planners to connect and reason across silos, translating static data into “live” systems that support real-time feedback and design space exploration; dynamic knowledge graphs (DKG) emerge as a critical innovation, capable of powering digital twins, parallel world simulations and multi-agent decision-making systems, thereby addressing not only interoperability issues but also the lack of causal linkages in traditional planning heuristics; while the synthetical meta-practice appears most developed in the literature due to its alignment with AI and ICT innovation, the projective meta-practice is underrepresented, revealing a need for more robust computational design frameworks that respect the inherent complexity of urban futures; crucially, the authors critique the visual primacy in digital tools and advocate for a more inclusive epistemology that recognises non-visual, processual and tacit dimensions of urban experience; SCPS therefore repositions urban planning as a design-scientific endeavour—an adaptive, ontology-driven knowledge ecosystem that can scaffold real-time urban interventions and adaptive policy modelling through semantic enrichment, domain ontologies and feedback systems, signalling a decisive move towards a city-science paradigm rooted in meaning, context and computation rather than static representations or expert silos. von Richthofen, A., Herthogs, P., Cairns, S., et al. (2022) Semantic City Planning Systems (SCPS): A Literature Review. Journal of Planning Literature, 37(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/08854122211068526