“Beyond automating tedious tasks, could AI help to open up the byzantine world of planning? Euan Mills thinks so. He used to work in the planning team of the Greater London Authority, where he assessed two major applications a day for six years. He regularly encountered developers who had paid far too much for land, and were therefore trying to squeeze as many homes on as possible to “make it viable”, while arguing they couldn’t meet the affordable housing requirements. Having since worked for central government on digitising the planning system, Mills has now co-founded Blocktype, an AI-powered tool for developers and planners, aimed at simplifying the process and ultimately reducing land speculation.

“The thing developers hate most is uncertainty,” says Mills. “The idea behind Blocktype is that it can give you a ballpark sense of what’s possible on a site, providing sketch layouts and viability appraisals.” Mills stresses it is not a replacement for architects, but a tool to help developers think spatially when trying to determine what to pay for land. It could also be used by local authorities to show what kinds of developments are permissible, reducing the guesswork.

“It’s essentially a pattern-book approach, trained on a library of the best possible layouts and floor plans,” says Mills, “avoiding things like double-loaded corridors and single-aspect flats. We’ve been designing housing for thousands of years, so why do we reinvent the wheel every single time?” Speculating on where such technology might go, Mills imagines a future where architects don’t charge for their time, but for their knowledge. “It’s like ‘algorithms as a service’,” he says. “A developer could generate a rough layout then pay to use a particular architect’s algorithm.”