Rossi, L., Ziada, H., Stevens, J., 2025.

Beyond the Orthographic Map: Generative AI and Urban Morphological Analysis

Representing the city in plan view has long been a primary tool for architects to analyse, envision and celebrate urban forms. A city's orthographic map allows architects and stakeholders to view the formal logic of the city quickly, to envision its spatial relations comprehensively and to gauge a scalable sense of measurement. Recently, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have provided robust information to orthographic maps, permitting more informed analysis and decision-making. Throughout this history, the agency of shaping urban form remained with the architect, while different orthographic maps implied different ideologies. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in urban analysis and design initiates shifts in representation, agency and ideology. It displaces the formal design of cities from the architect's humanist process to a post-human algorithm whereby AI ideates and generates urban fiction based on language-based and image-based models, representing urban form in infinite types of representational views. Our analysis will investigate historical orthogonal maps which signalled paradigm shifts in envisioning city form. and characterise ideology. The results will reflect on the impact of a diversifying toolkit of representations in AI urban analyses.