Released on November 8, 2025, 17:43:00Wuhan Municipal Bureau of Natural Resources and Urban-Rural Construction

On November 7, as a key part of the opening events of the 8th Wuhan Design Biennale, the 1st High-Level Dialogue on "AI + Urban Space and the Future" was grandly held in Wuhan, the "River City". Co-hosted by the Wuhan Municipal Bureau of Natural Resources and Urban-Rural Construction, the People's Government of Jiang'an District, and the Information Management Working Committee of the China Urban Planning Association, and organized by the Wuhan Natural Resources and Planning Information Center, the dialogue gathered top academicians and experts from domestic and foreign fields such as artificial intelligence, urban planning, architectural design, and geographic information. They jointly explored how artificial intelligence can empower urban development, offering suggestions and building consensus to enhance Wuhan's urban governance capacity and shape its future competitiveness.

Event Venue and Opening Remarks

The event was held at the "Four-Dimensional Space", a renovated and renewed former staff residence of the Japanese Mitsui Bussan Kaisha. The intersection of traditional architecture and future-oriented topics echoed the meeting's concept of innovating in inheritance and developing through integration. Xie Yingying, Secretary-General of the China Urban Planning Association, Yuan Yanbin, Vice Chairman of the Wuhan Association for Science and Technology, and Wu Junqin, Director of the Wuhan Municipal Bureau of Natural Resources and Urban-Rural Construction, attended the event and delivered speeches.

Director Wu Junqin pointed out that Wuhan shoulders the major mission entrusted by General Secretary Xi Jinping to "strive to explore a new path for the modern governance of megacities", and technological innovation is the key to answering this era's question. Currently, the integrated development of AI and urban space is at the right time. This high-level dialogue is an important practice for Wuhan to respond to national calls, embrace technological changes, and seize opportunities in future urban development.

Keynote Report Session

The keynote report session was hosted by Professor Jiao Yongli, Director of the Public Policy Innovation Research Center of the China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong. Well-known domestic and foreign experts and scholars delivered thematic reports, including Wu Zhiqiang (Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering), Zhang Jianting (Member of the WCCO International Alliance, Special Researcher of the Zhejiang Provincial Government), Shen Zhenjiang (Foreign Academician of the Engineering Academy of Japan), Han Linfei (Foreign Academician of the Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences), Liang Henian (Honorary Dean of the School of Urban and Regional Planning, Queen's University, Canada, online), Yu Zhigang (Deputy Director of the Information Center of the Ministry of Natural Resources), Yang Tao (Associate Professor of the School of Architecture, Tsinghua University), and Li Haiting (Director of the Wuhan Institute of Surveying and Mapping). They conducted in-depth discussions around core topics such as how AI changes urban spatial forms, improves quality of life, and upgrades industrial structures, leading to exciting collisions of ideas on site.

Key Reports and Insights

Wu Zhiqiang: Titled "Urban Life · Digital Intelligence Empowerment", his report elevated the conference to a philosophical height from a grand civilizational perspective. Starting with the origin of "Civilization", he profoundly explained the inherent unity between urban spatial organization and the evolution of human civilization. He pointed out that urban forms are always determined by "flows" such as human flow, material flow, and information flow, forming the wisdom law of "form shaped by flows, and form and flows coexisting". Facing the AI wave, Academician Wu creatively proposed that AI must be "trained" with thousands of years of urban civilization to understand and follow this underlying logic, thereby assisting humans in advancing the iteration and upgrading of civilization, and transforming cities from a physical world into a perceptible, learnable, well-governed, and self-evolving "living organism".

Zhang Jianting: His report, titled "Design Concept of Protecting Living Heritage Projects — Recording the Restoration of the Yanggongdi Scenic Area in the Core of the West Lake World Cultural Heritage", shared a classic case he personally presided over, vividly demonstrating how to conduct cultural heritage protection and restoration with an extremely prudent and scientific attitude. This case echoed the future vision of AI, reminding all planners that no matter how technology evolves, "people-oriented", respecting history, and conforming to nature are always the eternal cornerstones of urban development. Future smart cities will inevitably be masterpieces integrating technological charm and humanistic warmth.

Liang Henian: Delivered online a report titled "Rethinking AI and Urban Space: Starting from Functional Zoning". He directly pointed out the classic paradigm of modern urban planning, proposing that AI's powerful correlation analysis capabilities are helping us rediscover the inherent and complex organic connections between the three major spaces of "production, living, and ecology". Planners need to fundamentally "reunderstand space", break rigid functional zoning, and use AI to plan more dynamic mixed-function communities. He emphasized that the government needs to reshape governance responsibilities, suggesting that community planners may become a key professional direction connecting technological changes and people's livelihood needs.

Shen Zhenjiang: Titled "Intelligent Construction — Intelligent Services for Cities and Buildings", his report was based on the theoretical system of intelligent construction, systematically expounding the collaborative development path of cities and buildings under the background of intelligence and low carbonization. Focusing on the collaborative development of intelligence and low carbonization of cities and buildings, he proposed taking smart scenarios as carriers, constructing ecosystems such as human settlement environment perception and full-space unmanned services, and combining the technical system of "passive energy saving + active control + energy management" to achieve the goal of zero energy consumption throughout the entire life cycle of buildings from "design, construction to operation and maintenance".

Yu Zhigang: His report, titled "AI + Territorial Spatial Planning and Governance", demonstrated the most cutting-edge practices from the national governance perspective. Based on the needs of digital governance for a beautiful China, he detailed the strategic value of the Ministry of Natural Resources' "One Map" construction — supported by "one network, one set of data, and one platform", it empowers digital applications in multiple scenarios such as planning formulation, land use control, and disaster early warning through a unified geographical base map and property right base plate, providing a national-level solution for achieving digital governance and intelligent decision-making of the whole region and all elements.

Han Linfei: Titled "Humans, Architecture, Cities and Nature in the Abstract and Concrete Worlds — Challenges and Responses in the AI Era", his report took the evolution of abstract and concrete cognition as the philosophical foundation. On the basis of reviewing the evolution of the relationship between humans, architecture, cities, and nature in the history of human civilization, he explored the all-round changes in human value positioning, architectural functions, resource demands, and production methods under the impact of technology in the AI era. He proposed that architecture and cities need to innovate in inheritance, and achieve a higher dimension of sustainable coexistence between humans and nature through the revaluation and adaptive transformation of concrete heritage values.

Yang Tao: In his report "AI + Future Cities", he pointed out that artificial intelligence is driving the paradigm of future cities to leap from "static planning" to "dynamic growth". Based on the integration of physical, social, economic, and cultural dimensions, future cities build intelligent living organisms with interaction between physical space and information space through a digital twin base of "full-time and space perception, full-element linkage, and full-cycle iteration". Its core innovation lies in proposing the concept of "embodied spatial intelligence", regarding space as an active system that can actively perceive, predict, and influence human behavior through embedded sensors, AI models, and dynamic interactions. This transformation reconstructs the professional core of cities: architecture shifts from static composition to human-machine interaction architecture, planning upgrades from spatial resource allocation to AI-driven time-space scheduling, and design expands from form shaping to interactive experience of all things. In the future, relying on time-space sequence learning and swarm intelligence, cities will evolve into "self-perceiving, self-deciding, and self-learning" swarm spatio-temporal intelligent agents, ultimately realizing the future vision of a modern people's city.

Li Haiting: Titled "Mobile Surveying and Spatio-Temporal Intelligence Empowering Urban Governance", his report showed the participants how AI technology lands from the "cloud" and accurately infiltrates into the subtle veins of urban governance. He pointed out that the core of urban governance is to shift from passive disposal to active early warning, and spatio-temporal intelligence is the key engine to achieve this transformation. He introduced the important role of mobile survey vehicles and "laser point cloud + AI recognition" technology in practical work such as parking governance, large-scale event guarantee, and carbon emission management, vividly depicting the future urban landscape empowered by AI.

 The successful holding of this high-level dialogue marks a solid and important step in Wuhan's cutting-edge exploration in the field of "AI + cities". As the organizing unit, the Wuhan Natural Resources and Planning Information Center will take this dialogue as a new starting point and driving force, transform the experts' ideological sparks into action guidelines, further seize the opportunity of artificial intelligence development, take the global geographic spatial base as the foundation of the "urban digital twin", and solidly promote the full-chain and in-depth application of AI technology in urban planning, construction, management, and industrial upgrading. Facing the future development of urban space, it will actively explore and practice the "four-dimensional innovation" of digital concepts, digital bases, digital technologies, and digital scenarios, contributing "Wuhan's thinking" and "Wuhan's model" to the sustainable development of global cities.