ABSTRACT
Reading Urban AI through Lacan’s registers – the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real – this chapter shows how algorithmic apparatuses inform planners’ knowledge, reinforce a technocratic desire for control, and seduce with illusions of seamless order. Urban dashboards, digital twins, and predictive models stage Imaginary coherence, while a Symbolic regime of optimisation and metrics through using AI in planning sutures any critical challenges and consolidates the hegemonic ideology and its norms, values, and discourses. What is repressed is the Real as the conflictual, contingent, and unprogrammable textures of urban everyday life. A psychoanalytic critique reopens planning to democratic judgement and ethical responsibility, insisting that cities remain irreducible to data and AI-generated images, and that emancipation lies with the Real.
