Strolling Cities: AI-Generated Italian Urban Landscapes

Strolling Cities, directed by Mauro Martino (founder of the Visual Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab), is a project that uses generative AI to create real-time urban landscapes in the style of specific Italian cities. Developed in collaboration with students from Politecnico di Milano, MindEarth (a company specializing in city mapping via street-level photographic surveys), and researcher Dalila Colucci of Harvard University, the project employs a Voice-to-City AI system. The AI understands spoken words and generates corresponding cityscapes, drawing from over two million images collected by Politecnico students who walked empty streets during lockdown with cameras. The software produces scenes that evoke the atmosphere of a particular city, akin to how readers mentally construct settings from a book's descriptions. The project is showcased at www.strollingcities.com.