Augmented Reality Offers a New Perspective on Urban Planning

Public land use projects and digital gaming don’t seem to have much in common. But the next wave of innovation to shape cities may come from a technology that’s blurring those lines. Last year, for instance, the Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA) set out to win voter approval for a tax to fund a new transit plan in Columbus, called LinkUs, that included a new bus rapid transit corridor. To make its case, the agency needed to help officials, and ultimately the public, visualize the positive changes this could bring to the corridor, adjacent neighborhoods, and the commuting experience. That’s a familiar challenge, but COTA’s strategy included an unusual component: augmented reality (AR) technology.

Artists and game designers have made creative use of AR—which layers digital images on top of real-world views seen through phones, headsets, and other devices—for years. In popular games like Pokémon Go, you peer at the world through your device’s screen, and the physical environment is suddenly inhabited by animated creatures and other digital objects relevant to game play. But AR can also be used to layer visualizations of more civic-minded elements onto city spaces: public art, monuments, and even transportation infrastructure.

“A lot of presentations were being done in the community via PowerPoint or a pitch deck,” recalls Aslyne Rodriguez, COTA’s senior director of regional strategic partnerships. “However, there was this need for and want to have something that was a more tangible experience.” The planned corridor was simply a highway. How to engage citizens with what its future could be? “It was important for people to know what bus rapid transit looks like, but we also wanted to show them what happens when you bring bus rapid transit,” Rodriguez continues. “New development pops up, new business, new grocery stores. And [the project included] protected bike lanes and connections to trails. So it was a very big message.”

Learning about AR led them to inCitu, a technology firm based in New York that has produced a range of AR experiences, from walking tours to visualizations of municipal projects. With additional partners including the strategic engagement firm MurphyEpson, they identified key sites along the current, regular bus route and devised an immersive tour: Participants would use their phone to scan a QR code, activating AR-enhanced depictions of what was planned. Guided, immersive bus tours ran twice a week for six months, attended by hundreds of community stakeholders. In addition, the partners placed QR codes on existing bus shelters and other points along the route to make the AR pitch even more accessible for those unable to take the guided tour. Voters approved the plan’s funding.

Of course, COTA also used traditional outreach methods, including community meetings and presentations, and a social media push (the mayor even posted a selfie in the AR version of a new transit station). But this form of digital immersion offers a distinct engagement experience. “There is something magical about scanning a QR code, raising your phone, and seeing the future,” says inCitu founder and CEO Dana Chermesh-Reshef.

COTA’s successful experience was cited in a December 2024 report from Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute that explored the possibilities of augmented reality for cities and municipalities. But those possibilities may also introduce challenges; consider, after all, the disruptions caused by the emergence of ride-sharing, short-term rentals, and smart-city technologies, says Greg Lindsay, the report’s author and a former urban tech fellow at the Urban Tech Hub. Lindsay wrote the afterword for the Lincoln Institute’s City Tech book and delivered remarks on cities and technology at a recent Lincoln Institute convening on land policy and digitalization.

AR, Lindsay argues, is at heart a new way of using public spaces by adding digital layers to them, potentially raising questions about how such content (commercial and otherwise) should be overseen or regulated, and who will end up setting those terms: tech platforms, cities, or some other entity. The challenge for cities, Lindsay says, is: “Can you get better at anticipating disruptors and heading them off at the pass?”

This is why one of the recommendations in Lindsay’s report is that cities should be open to experimenting with AR sooner rather than later, to develop a comfort level with the technology, even if potential use cases aren’t fully determined. While COTA provides a striking example of using AR in a way that directly impacted land use decisions, Lindsay points out that collaborations with artists, educators, and civic groups can also play a role. This year, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the New York Parks Department, and the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation presented an AR restaging of the artists’ famous 2005 installation, The Gates, creating a digital version of the piece’s 7,500 saffron-colored panels, visible through a smartphone. And artist Marcus Brown used AR to create what amounted to a digital installation around New Orleans, mapping and illustrating the history of the slave trade in that city. The possibilities, say AR proponents, are nearly endless.

These nascent technologies have considerable potential to improve cities, argues Chip Giller, cofounder and executive director of Agog: The Immersive Media Institute. “Storytelling can become three-dimensional, and planning tools can become three-dimensional,” he says. “So rather than just having a charette or having a computer model, you’ll be able to actually step into what the future could be.” Agog works with creators and nonprofit leaders to “harness the power of extended reality,” or XR, a term that encompasses augmented reality, virtual reality, and adjacent technologies.

One of Agog’s partners, Arizona State University, is in the third year of an ambitious project to reimagine and redevelop 14 vacant parcels in Los Angeles owned by Caltrans, the California transit agency. ASU is adopting the parcels, which Caltrans owns but had no plans for, under the agency’s Adopt-A-Highway program. With the help of other partners including Los Angeles Trade Tech Professor Marcela Oliva and the Collaboratorium, ASU’s Narrative and Emerging Media program is using technology to help engage community members in plans to develop the sites, says Nonny de la Peña, director of the ASU program and a pioneer in immersive digital storytelling.

Many of the lots are highway adjacent and awkwardly sized and located, and some have become targets for dumping and graffiti. The goal is not only to use AR and other immersive tech to plan new uses, but to help bring community members into the process, says de la Peña, “to regreen [the spaces], turn them into parks.” One space along the 110 freeway through downtown, not far from ASU’s satellite campus, has been turned into a community garden and park, and the partnership has broken ground on a second space and was choosing a third this spring.

As de la Peña explains, the project involves creating a three-dimensional digital twin of each site that students, residents, and stakeholders can experiment with, shaping what the space might become. “Before we even update the physical side of the site, we’re working with the community by teaching them some basic skills of creating 3D models,” says Sultan Sharrief, an ASU researcher and self-described “media scientist” in de la Peña’s program. “We’re providing the tools and the kind of structure—for example, how do we create the digital library of plants that will succeed in these spaces so they can then design with those in mind?” They’re now equipping the first site with sensors to keep its digital twin updated, so community members can keep tweaking the space. “We’re just getting started,” de la Peña says.

InCitu, the firm that helped bring AR into the Columbus transportation effort, is now involved in projects in Phoenix, New York, and other cities. In Washington, DC, the company is working with both the planning office and the office of technology, and it’s starting work with a downtown revitalization effort in Myrtle Beach, SC. It also now provides a web-based AR platform called inCituAR, designed to let planners and architects share their ideas and proposals, to experiment directly with the technology and its capabilities. In other words, plenty of municipal entities seem to be taking Lindsay’s advice to get familiar with AR and other immersive tools while they are still in relatively early stages.

“It’s not about the cool technology,” says inCitu’s Chermesh-Reshef, “it’s about the fact that this technology actually enables easy engagement and effective engagement.” The most promising projects, she says, are attempting to address one of the most familiar and longstanding challenges, and aspirations, of planning: “Our goal is to foster better conversations.”

Rob Walker is the author of City Tech: 20 Apps, Ideas, and Innovators Changing the Urban Landscape and The Art of Noticing. More of his writing can be found at robwalker.substack.com.

Lead image: Augmented reality allows this tablet owner to visualize a proposed affordable housing development in the Bronx, New York. The building visible behind the people on the screen replaces the parked cars in the actual background.