From a photo to a built street.
No survey, no zoning map, no jargon at the entrance. One loop — sense, decide, act — shown here in Helsinki Summer Streets, with the City of Helsinki.
A photo of a real street — the only input citizens need to start.
A citizen committee and entrepreneurs generate, debate and vote on scenarios together.
Helsinki Summer Streets, delivered — the loop closed on the real street.
The ballot box is the wrong template for design.
You choose once, blind, and live with it. Take a different Helsinki street — the Esplanadi cycle-lane experiment: we’ve all seen the same sequence play out — participation, then discontent, then demolition.
Democracy isn’t just about choice. It’s about rethinking your choice.
A reparative technology.
The deepest repair is to participation itself — which has a default participant (adult, articulate, free on a weekday evening) while everyone else is structurally absent. Our agents can be tuned to centre the people, and the species, planning routinely overlooks.
A child-specific participatory AI — with an Architects’ Council of Europe grant, piloted in Finnish schools and at Milan Digital Week.
With UNDP Accelerator Labs Panama, students turned photos of their own waterfront into climate-adaptation scenarios they could own.
At BiodiverseCity? (Estonian Museum of Natural History, Tallinn) a tuned model let children reimagine communal areas as wilder habitats.
Imagination, evaluated against policy.
The newest layer answers the question every authority asks next: fine, but is it compliant — and is it good? Agents score co-designed scenarios against EU policy, local design guides and municipal strategy, while professionals keep the final word.
The scenario, assessed
A generated image is easy to love and easy to dismiss. Switch to Evaluated to see the assessment that makes it usable in planning.
Bologna’s own catalogue of permeable, vegetal and mineral materials becomes the evaluation criteria — checked while imagination is still cheap to change. Also in evaluation: Vienna Supergrätzl and Dubai Municipality. · Illustrative scoring.
Already in the field — and it travels.
3,000+ ideas, ~300 votes reimagining the space around the Siegestor.
An interactive play area and shaded cycling track — with planning law in the loop.
Collective imagination feeding directly into the municipal strategy document.
Participatory AI at the most consequential scale: a city that does not exist yet.
A UNDP-led regeneration with the mayor’s office at the table.
Seventh Hill’s Connect East Cleveland — community-led co-design, from the first photograph.
Behind the room, you stay in control.
Participants see no software to learn — just a photo and a question. Organisers configure the session before it starts, then watch and steer it as it runs.
Pick where images come from — upload, library or map — and how participants reshape them: theme, draw or prompt.