2025 Dale Prize: AI in Urban Planning: Current and Future Applications

The Dale Prize recognizes planning excellence, creates dialogue between scholars and practitioners, and enriches the education of planning students. The Dale Prize is awarded in pairs: a $5,000 award to a scholar and a $5,000 award to a practitioner. Awardees spend two days meeting with students in classes and participate in a colloquium and other events.

The 2025 theme is AI in Urban Planning

 The 2025 Dale Prize Colloquium is open to the public, and will be offered by Zoom. We invite all to the Dale Prize Colloquium, 6:00 p.m.-7:30 p.m. (PST) on Tuesday, March 4th.  Registration is required. Dale Prize Colloquium Registration

Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents an emerging tool in the field of urban planning. As we confront the environmental and social challenges of the 21st century, the integration of AI into urban planning practices offers unprecedented opportunities to create resilient, equitable and sustainable urban environments. The theme for this year’s award emphasizes the transformative potential of AI in urban planning.

Urban planners have long sought innovative solutions to address complex place-based issues, where AI provides a powerful means to achieve these goals. AI's ability to analyze vast datasets, model intricate systems, and predict future scenarios enables planners to make informed decisions that promote environmental stewardship and social equity. Beyond its technical capabilities, AI, if ethically applied, has the potential to play a key role in facilitating the planning process, offering new ways to include historically marginalized communities in shaping their urban futures. The application of AI in urban planning goes beyond mere efficiency. It has the potential to foster inclusivity, transparency, and innovation in the planning process.

This year, we celebrate the intersection of AI and urban planning, recognizing those who harness the power of AI for the public good to advance sustainable environments. Moreover, this theme acknowledges the evolving role of AI as an indispensable partner in urban planning with the potential to shape the cities of tomorrow in a positive manner.

Overall, we are seeking a practitioner and scholar working in the intersections of AI and urban planning, emphasizing innovative methods and AI techniques to address environmental and social challenges.  This includes environmental and social challenges, such as climate change and climate-driven disasters, sustainability, environmental hazards, ecological change, environmental health, population change and migration, food (in)security, development and related issues. Candidates should have experience with cutting-edge methods, including but not limited to: spatial analysis, (spatial big data) data mining, machine learning, deep learning for image or text analysis, causal inference, data-driven discovery, planning visualization, scalable computing, and cloud-based remote sensing. We are interested in scholars and practitioners engaged with computational techniques or analyses of algorithmic bias and theories and practices to advance the emerging field of AI in urban planning such as field work, planning outcome evaluation, community engagement, knowledge transition, and decision-making.