Dual-stage Flows-based Generative Modeling for Traceable Urban Planning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dual-stage normalizing flows framework for urban planning that improves the interpretability and stability of automated land-use configuration generation by modeling zone relationships and fused information.

Contribution

The novel dual-stage framework effectively captures relationships among urban zones and fuses information, addressing limitations of previous models in urban planning.

Findings

Outperforms existing generative models in urban planning tasks.

Effectively models relationships among functional zones.

Provides more interpretable and stable planning outputs.

Abstract

Urban planning, which aims to design feasible land-use configurations for target areas, has become increasingly essential due to the high-speed urbanization process in the modern era. However, the traditional urban planning conducted by human designers can be a complex and onerous task. Thanks to the advancement of deep learning algorithms, researchers have started to develop automated planning techniques. While these models have exhibited promising results, they still grapple with a couple of unresolved limitations: 1) Ignoring the relationship between urban functional zones and configurations and failing to capture the relationship among different functional zones. 2) Less interpretable and stable generation process. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel generative framework based on normalizing flows, namely Dual-stage Urban Flows (DSUF) framework. Specifically, the first stage is to utilize zone-level urban planning flows to generate urban functional zones based on given surrounding contexts and human guidance. Then we employ an Information Fusion Module to capture the relationship among functional zones and fuse the information of different aspects. The second stage is to use configuration-level urban planning flows to obtain land-use configurations derived from fused information. We design several experiments to indicate that our framework can outperform compared to other generative models for the urban planning task.