Procedural modelling, once a niche technique in computer graphics, has grown into an increasingly important infrastructure within computational urbanism, geodesign, 3D GIS, heritage reconstruction, scenario-based planning and urban digital-twin research. A new open-access review argues that this shift has not merely changed how cities are visualised, but how they are known and governed.
The study, published in City, Territory and Architecture, is a systematic historical analysis of 60 coded sources spanning the 1970s to August 2025. Its authors, Farshad Shariatpour, Amir Shakibamanesh and Morteza Rahbar, synthesise developments across computer graphics, architecture, GIS, planning and digital-twin research.
The central claim is that procedural modelling is best understood as a partial and situated mode of urban knowing and governing. It translates selected urban realities into executable rules, data pipelines and algorithms, while other forms of urban knowledge must remain present through qualitative, participatory, historical and political inquiry.
The review organises this trajectory into five eras: formal grammars, procedural cities, the planning turn, GIS integration, and digital-twin and AI convergence. Across these periods, procedural techniques migrated across domains, transforming from representational tools into platforms for simulation, participation and operational monitoring.
The paper contributes a mediation framework linking data, rules, algorithms, morphology and governance. It also proposes a typology of encoded assumptions concerning control, normativity, scale, variability and uncertainty.
Notably, the authors reframe familiar technical concerns as epistemological and political problems. Calibration, data dependency and interpretability, they argue, are questions of ground truth, visibility, accountability and participation rather than purely engineering matters.
The conclusion is a call for governability: procedural urban infrastructures must be made governable through validation, explainability, uncertainty communication, public contestability and institutional auditability.
As a review, the study synthesises existing literature rather than presenting new empirical data, and its findings concern how the field has been documented and debated. The article is published open access and is currently available as an early, citable version subject to further edits.
Subject of Research: The historical evolution of procedural modelling as infrastructure in computational urbanism and governance
Article Title: Procedural urbanism as infrastructure: a systematic historical analysis of rules, data, and governance
Article References: Shariatpour, F., Shakibamanesh, A., & Rahbar, M. (2026). Procedural urbanism as infrastructure: a systematic historical analysis of rules, data, and governance. City, Territory and Architecture. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40410-026-00325-8
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1186/s40410-026-00325-8
Keywords: procedural modelling, urban planning, digital twins, 3D GIS, geodesign, computational urbanism, governance, algorithms, heritage reconstruction, urban simulation, epistemology, data pipelines
News Source: Courtney Benton. (October 28, 2026). How Rules, Data and Algorithms Came to Shape Cities: A 50-Year History of Procedural Urbanism. Scienmag.
