Emerging Urban Design Technologies:
From Disparate Tools to Integrated Systems, from Digital to Intelligent
Yu Ye, Jiayu Xu, Yuhan Guo
Abstract：The past decade has seen an unprecedented emergence of urban design technologies, fundamentally reshaping
the field of urban design. After several years of development, new technologies and data have entered a phase of
synergistic integration, aligning with a broader paradigm shift in urban design. In this context, this paper discusses
the development of three categories of urban design technologies, with each corresponding to a major phase of the
urban design workflow. The first focuses on built environment analysis and performance measurement, primarily
addressing the preliminary assessment work before design. The second category centers on theoretical framework
development and pattern analysis, which involves understanding fundamental principles of urban design. The
third category is dedicated to proposal generation and optimization. This paper offers a comprehensive view of
how these technologies are deeply embedded in key process of urban design, and therefore demonstrates their
strong potential for integration with the core insights of urban design fields. The deep application of urban design
technologies is breaking through the limitations of traditional workflows. First, site analysis will shift from smallsample
enumeration to large-scale data induction. Second, theoretical understanding, once experience-based,
will now rely more on data-driven derivations. Third, the design process will evolve from manual drawing to
intelligent proposal generation. These transformations will further drive the emergence of a “design science” in
urban design. Reflecting this trend, this paper proposes a computational urban design technology system, aiming
to clarify its core structure and innovative value, thereby promoting a computational and intelligent paradigm shift
in the discipline.
