Artificial intelligence is no longer a promise of the future – it has already become part of the systems that run our cities. It drafts emails, designs buildings, steers traffic, and powers civic chatbots. It answers before we finish asking. Sometimes it lies, sometimes it hallucinates – and yet it always responds. This issue of topos does not celebrate AI, nor does it dismiss it. Instead, it takes the machine seriously. For planners, architects, and urbanists, AI is now embedded in the very fabric of urban life – silently shaping infrastructures, simulations, and decisions. But what values are hidden in its code? Who defines its assumptions? And what happens when the model becomes more legible than the street itself? We explore the promises and perils of a technology that reproduces the past more than it imagines the future, that optimizes for efficiency but risks narrowing democracy. From hackers and ethicists to urban designers and policy-makers, this issue uncovers the ethical, political, and practical questions behind AI’s urban influence. AI Pioneers asks not what AI can do for cities, but what it means when urbanism itself becomes a function of AI.

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topos magazine – is the leading international magazine for urban planning from Munich, Germany. For topos  magazine, everything revolves around the sustainable city of the future. Online, topos spends 365 days a year dealing with the question: how will we live sustainably, healthily, and technologized in the world’s future metropolises? In addition to its website, topos is published four times a year as a print magazine. topos addresses everyone who is interested in the smarter, greener city of the future and who works in, on, and with the city. Our readers include CEOs, mayors, architects, landscape architects, urban planners, engineers, digitalization specialists, researchers – simply everyone who is interested in urban development! Nice to have you here, let’s change the world together!