Urban Morphology in the Age of Artificial Intelligence – ISUF Torino 2025

URBAN MORPHOLOGY IN THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The conference "Urban Morphology in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" invites researchers and practitioners to explore how AI technologies (in all forms) are transforming the study of urban forms, spatial structures, and city dynamics. It also raises the question: How do contemporary and emerging tools influence the evolution of urban form and the practice of urban morphology?

THE URBAN FORM BETWEEN TRADITION AND NEW CHALLENGES
While the question of urban form can be answered through various definitions, it is important to note that in the twenty-first century, artificial intelligence has opened new avenues for both tools and the concept of urban form, which have yet to be fully explored. As AI becomes increasingly prevalent in urban analysis and planning, it is vital to examine not only its potential but also its limitations, ethical considerations, and broader socio-spatial impacts. We encourage papers that address AI from a reflective perspective, considering how it reshapes our understanding of urban forms and urban life, as well as how urban professionals can respond to its challenges and opportunities.
How do these advancements challenge or reinforce traditional urban morphology, and what new paradigms are emerging as a result?
ISUF 2025 encourages further investigation into these transformative influences and their implications for the future of urban morphology and its impact on design, research and pedagogy.

What is changing in the study of urban form in the age of artificial intelligence? What tools are available for the representation of the city and its past, but also for the prefiguration of its future, in the age of artificial intelligence? What theories and practices, what poetics and data processing tools are available to technicians and society in the age of artificial intelligence? What developments is the urban space project taking, which aims to be oriented toward ecological transition in the time of artificial intelligence?
Nearly 300 scholars from five continents will meet from June 17 to 20 at the Castello del Valentino to reflect on these topics. The occasion is the International Seminar on Urban Form (ISUF), which celebrates its thirty-second edition in Turin this year (https://www.isuf2025.org/). The event, ideally aimed at all cities around the world starting with the City of Turin as a digital citizenship laboratory, is hosted by the Politecnico di Torino with the Department of Architecture and Design. The scientific approach and organization of the Congress were handled by the Transitional Morphologies Research Center, led by Marco Trisciuoglio and active for over ten years in studying the dynamics of transformation of urban form in Europe, Asia, and the Global South, also with the Joint Research Unit established between Southeast University of Nanjing, China, and the same Politecnico di Torino.

The themes of discussion will focus on the possible forms of the cities of the future, built on their past which is our present, the themes of increasingly sophisticated tools that technology and science offer to study urban forms, new theories and models through which to view/conceive urban form, and various possible experiments already in place that look at the city as a true technological as well as political device, in the broad sense of the word.
Among the crucial moments of the Conference will be lectures by Attilio Petruccioli and Tolga Ünlü, respectively on the traditions of Italian and Anglo-Saxon research in the field of urban morphology and their approach to the new paradigm of trained, intelligent, thinking machines. Bruno Ruffilli will interview Barbara Caputo and Meta Berghauser Pont on the state of the art of Artificial Intelligence and Urban Morphology and on the many possible intersections between the two areas of expertise, while Lars Marcus’s lecture on the settled territory and built environment as spatial capital will offer new insights into the reality in which we operate, with our ideas and our machines.
The ISUF network will remember its first President, Anne Moudon, who recently passed away, and will revisit the legacy of Jeremy Whitehand, the scholar most committed to converging the two major schools toward a unique curious exploration of the urban world, as evidenced by the vibrant and increasingly globally extended network of regional networks.

Politecnico di Torino will propose the theme of the social impact of urban morphology research in the form of "common engagement,” offer an innovative re-reading of Augusto Cavallari Murat’s research in the 1960s as a forerunner of Space Syntax, and most importantly, launch (through a Dive Deep session on artificial intelligence and territory) a possible Master's minor program to be associated with studies in both urban design and computer science and automation.

Marco Trisciuoglio, the organizer of the conference, will give a lecture on the urban form of Turin, titled The Chessboard as a Matrix of a Transitional Morphology:
"For our Transitional Morphologies Research Center, celebrating this conference in Turin is a very important opportunity. We said three months ago at the preparatory seminar in Nanjing: with its rapid development, artificial intelligence presents new challenges for the study of urban forms and also provides new concepts and tools for the research and practice of urban morphology. It is obvious that, in the face of the growing spread of artificial intelligence applications in urban analysis and design, it is necessary to study not only its potential but also its limits, considering its ethical, environmental, and socio-spatial impact. Doing so within a major European technical university, like our Politecnico, confronting some of the leading artificial intelligence experts, makes our challenges difficult and exciting.”