Research pick: How does your garden grow? - "Spatial layout design of garden landscapes based on a hybrid metaheuristic optimisation algorithm"

The future of urban green space might be written in code, according to research in the International Journal of Reasoning-based Intelligent Systems. The age-old image of the landscape architect, sketchbook in hand, guided by intuition and a feel for the land, is being dug over by digital disruption. The work suggests that for city and town planners facing increasingly dense populations and the problems that climate change brings, the art of urban garden design needs reseeding with modern tools to fertilise new ideas.

Urban green spaces are now recognised as increasingly important for the recreation, enjoyment, and wellbeing of city dwellers, Moreover, such as spaces and in particular the protective effects of trees during scorching summers and the atmospheric cleansing they bring are no longer an aesthetic luxury but an essential part of the modern cityscape. The concrete jungle needs to go green, and an algorithmic augmentation of human intuition can help balance the competing pressures in landscaping our urban spaces.

The researchers talk of “landscape optimization” wherein a green space or garden is not simply a canvas on which to paint trees, lawns and shrubberies, but a complex data problem that can be more effectively solved algorithmically without compromising art nor beauty. The team merging aesthetics and ecology reframe the problem into a “rationality index” which considers the terrain profile, soil health, and the local climate to provide the computer with a unified metric it can interpret and from which it can provide novel design solutions using various algorithms based on natural systems such as honeybee behaviour and ant colonies.

In preliminary tests, the team found that their hybrid algorithmic approach worked better than conventional methods used to calculate land-use efficiency. They emphasise that by treating landscape design as an optimizable process, city planners can produce evidence-based layouts that are reproducible, resilient, and reliable. While the immediate focus is on gardens, the implications for wider urban planning are significant. As public authorities face mounting pressure to meet sustainability targets, the “intuition” of the past may soon give way to the “optimization” of the future.

Cheng, Y., Guo, L., Ao, S. and Wu, W. (2025) ‘Spatial layout design of garden landscapes based on a hybrid metaheuristic optimisation algorithm’, Int. J. Reasoning-based Intelligent Systems, Vol. 17, No. 12, pp.13–23.