Imagine · Luleå University of Technology · 2026
Children rarely get a real say in how their neighbourhoods are designed. In a workshop for Luleå University of Technology on 19 January 2026, schoolchildren photographed real places around Luleå — a seafront shopping street, a café-lined plaza — and reimagined them with an AI co-planning tool, producing 236 generated images in a day. The results are unmistakably theirs: a unicorn on the cycle path, slapstick comedy in the square, alongside genuinely plausible urban-design ideas an adult-run process would likely never permit.
Who took part
Schoolchildren in a university-run participatory-mapping format: photograph real places, place the pictures on a map, then reimagine them.
What the tool did
An open, playful brief with no constraint to “realistic” adult planning language — evidence that giving children a voice in planning doesn’t have to mean asking them to think like adults.
