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Bringing Whimsy Back

Using generative AI to visually argue that cities could be more whimsical.

A Reddit post on r/berkeleyca showing an AI rendering of the North Berkeley BART parking lot reimagined as a Hogwarts-style castle village, with 277 upvotes, 71 comments, and 48K views.

Highlights

  • Reimagined a BART parking lot as a walkable, whimsical complex.
  • Great user engagement on the post.
  • Image generation made the pitch visual instead of a wall of text.
  • Named the 'AI slop' critique up front to get past it.
A typical five-story 5-over-1 apartment building on a street corner, with ground-floor retail and a patchwork of gray, blue, orange, and beige siding panels.
A particularly egregious 5-over-1.

Overview

A small design-advocacy experiment. When a commenter on a previous post in r/berkeleyca told me to stop living in an emotional driven fantasy world, I generated a rendering of the North Berkeley BART parking lot reimagined as a Hogwarts-style village and posted it. Our cities could have more attractive residential developments rather than drab blue and gray boxes, a.k.a 5-over-1s.

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Why bother

Most online arguments about cities stay abstract and end in nothing. A picture skips the debate. People saw a place they wanted to live and started arguing about how to get there instead of whether it was worth wanting.

Whimsy is underrated in how we build. The post was a low-stakes way to push on that, and to see whether a hopeful, slightly absurd image could move a comment section that usually runs cynical.