Topos

Oh, hi there! I’m topos, the leading international magazine for urban planning from Munich, Germany. For me, everything revolves around the sustainable city of the future. Online, I spend 365 days a year dealing with the question: how will we live sustainably, healthily and technologized in the world’s future metropolises? In addition to my home www.toposmagazine.com, I am published four times a year as a print magazine (that’s what you are holding in your hands right now!). I address everyone who is interested in the smarter, greener city of the future and who works in, on and with the city. My readers include CEOs, mayors, architects, landscape architects, urban planners, engineers, digitalization specialists, researchers – simply everyone that is interested in urban development! My great passion is finding and analyzing…

It speaks fluently now – this thing we still call artificial intelligence, though the term has long since outgrown its own definition. It drafts our emails, draws our buildings, answers our questions before we’ve finished asking them. Sometimes it lies. Sometimes it hallucinates. Always, it responds. And that, of course, is the seduction. This issue of topos does not celebrate AI. Nor does it warn you off. It does something more dangerous: it takes the machine seriously. For the urbanist, the architect, the planner, the administrator of increasingly digitalised complexity, AI is no longer a speculative force. It is embedded – silently and exponentially – in everything from traffic modulation to zoning simulation, from energy grids to civic chatbots. The city, once a physical terrain of political decision and social…

Let’s be honest: no civilisation in history has been so pathologically afraid of its own progress as 21st-century Europe. A continent that once launched the Renaissance, split the atom, and gave the world Bauhaus now trembles at the mere mention of a machine learning model. Artificial Intelligence – arguably the most promising technological breakthrough since electricity – is met not with ambition or excitement, but with bureaucratic dread, academic foot-dragging, and the mother of all regulatory frameworks: the “German Angst”, which is now increasingly becoming “European Angst”. Let’s be clear. The European AI Act, for example, is not just cautious – it’s neurotic. Designed under the pretext of human dignity and safety, it betrays a deeper pathology: a collective Western panic in the face of exponential technological change. While American…

Some call it the future of companionship. Others call it a soft apocalypse in high heels. In China’s rapidly expanding sex tech industry, AI-powered, fully customisable sex dolls are no longer fringe curiosities-they’re mainstream commodities. Equipped with facial recognition, machine learning, and eerily pleasant conversation scripts, these silicone partners are designed not just to simulate affection, but to eliminate the need for negotiation, friction, or unpredictability. In other words: human relationships, minus the humans. For around $3,000 customers can specify everything: eye colour, breast size, language, personality, even preferred political ideology. Want a submissive libertarian who whispers sweet nothings in Mandarin? There’s a drop-down menu for that. The pitch is clear: intimacy without complication. Emotional labour? Obsolete. Consent? Pre-programmed. This phenomenon isn’t just a quirky cultural footnote - it’s a…

THERESA RAMISCH studied Urban Planning at the TU Munich. She began working as an editor for G+L and topos in 2016. Since 2021, she has been Editor in Chief for G+L – the leading German magazine for Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning. Since 2023, she has also been Editor in Chief for topos. Oil has made the Arabian Peninsula wealthy, but this source of income will eventually run dry. For this reason, Saudi Arabia has been pursuing plans for years to establish new revenue streams; a major focus being artificial intelligence, including the flagship project Oxagon, which is a subproject of the vast urban development Neom. Neom is considered one of the world’s most expensive construction undertakings. Estimated costs for the megaproject vary significantly, but are believed to range from…

This article is a deep dive into how AI is changing urban planning, from zoning to citizen engagement, from traffic simulations to ethical conundrums. But don’t worry – this isn’t a techutopian monologue. We stay firmly on the ground (preferably landscaped), unpacking the biases, the black boxes, and the bureaucratic joys of algorithmic accountability. What emerges is not fear or fascination, but a new professional frontier: one where planners must learn to navigate not just streets and districts, but datasets and neural networks. So, before your next neighbourhood consultation is run by a chatbot – or worse, your design gets auto-optimised into a concrete nightmare – read on. This is your witty, well-informed guide to the promises, puzzles, and urban poetry of planning with AI. Welcome to the augmented polis…