Hemy24/stepwise-generative-urban-design

Stepwise Generative Urban Design

ControlNet-based diffusion models for automatic urban design generation, conditioned on site constraints and text descriptions.

Paper: Human-guided urban form generation using multimodal diffusion models, Building and Environment, 2026

Full paper; Arxiv; Code & documentation: GitHub

Models

Six checkpoints covering two cities × three pipeline steps:

Checkpoint	City	Step
checkpoints_step1_nyc	New York City	Site constraints → Land use + road network
checkpoints_step1_chi	Chicago	Site constraints → Land use + road network
checkpoints_step2_nyc	New York City	Land use + roads → Building footprint layout
checkpoints_step2_chi	Chicago	Land use + roads → Building footprint layout
checkpoints_step3_nyc	New York City	Building footprints → Satellite image
checkpoints_step3_chi	Chicago	Building footprints → Satellite image

Fine-tuned from runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5 + ControlNet. Checkpoints are FP16, ~2.9 GB each.

Citation

@article{he2025human,
  title   = {Human-guided urban form generation using multimodal diffusion models},
  author  = {He, Mingyi and Liang, Yuebing and Wang, Shenhao and Zheng, Yunhan
             and Wang, Qingyi and Zhuang, Dingyi and Tian, Li and Zhao, Jinhua},
  journal = {Building and Environment},
  pages   = {113892},
  year    = {2025},
  doi     = {10.1016/j.buildenv.2025.113892}
}

@article{he2025generative,
  title   = {Generative {AI} for urban design: a stepwise approach integrating
             human expertise with multimodal diffusion models},
  author  = {He, Mingyi and Liang, Yuebing and Wang, Shenhao and Zheng, Yunhan
             and Wang, Qingyi and Zhuang, Dingyi and Tian, Li and Zhao, Jinhua},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.24260},
  year    = {2025}
}