Leveraging Generative AI for Landscape Planning
| Authors: | Kristin Floress, Jenna Zukswert |
| Year: | 2026 |
| Type: | Other |
| Station: | Northern Research Station |
| Source: | FS |
Abstract
Successful landscape planning projects often incorporate input from local community members who live and work in the project area. Most people need to be able to see what a proposed change might look like; words are not enough. Images can provide a useful starting point for discussion among community members and planners, but community values and goals can be time-consuming to subsequently incorporate into draft visualizations and plans. Even when landscape architects can render visualizations for communities to use in planning, this process often requires meeting with stakeholders, developing visualizations, getting feedback on visualizations, and editing them: a cycle that might occur several times before images that represent stakeholders’ viewpoints are effectively created.
Now, generative text-to-image tools that use artificial intelligence (AI) can create images from keywords. This transformative technology has the potential to improve the community engagement process in landscape planning and help ensure that these projects meet the community's needs quickly without requiring extensive graphic design knowledge.