Vision Without Surveillance

Using Zero-Shot CLIP for Scalable Built Environment Feature Extraction

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.66838/sauc.6430

Keywords:

Urban Planning, AI for cities, Vision-Language Models, Planning support systems, Urban metrics, Scalable urban feature extraction

Abstract

Municipalities need current, granular built-environment data to support effective planning. However, current collection methods are expensive, challenging to scale, and present privacy concerns. To address this gap, the authors collaborated with the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) through a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) initiative. We developed a scalable, privacy-preserving vision-language model (VLM) pipeline that leverages zero-shot CLIP to extract 150+ interpretable urban design features from street-level imagery. Applied to Philadelphia’s bus network, the pipeline processed over two million images and generated block-level predictions for more than 8,000 blocks. This approach enables scalable, evidence-based urban planning across cities.

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Author Biographies

Malikka Rajshahi, Department of Computer Science, City University of New York Graduate Center

Malikka Rajshahi is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the CUNY Graduate Center and a machine learning engineer and research collaborator at State of Place. Her research focuses on AI in urban science and machine learning for the public interest, with particular interests in privacy-preserving AI, multimodal learning, and data-driven methods for understanding cities and evaluating urban interventions. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science from New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering.

Mariela Alfonzo, Department of Technology, Culture and Society, NYU Tandon School of Engineering

Bridging the worlds of academia and practice, Dr. Alfonzo is the Founder and CEO of State of Place, an AI-driven urban design data and predictive analytics software that helps citymakers make more effective, cost-efficient, bottom-up, transparent, and accountable citymaking decisions to create more thriving places. State of Place grew out of Urban Imprint, an urban design-behavior research and consulting firm, Dr. Alfonzo established in 2005, via which she worked with a range of private and public sector real estate stakeholders translating data into evidence-based design, development, and planning guidance. In the Fall of 2014, Dr. Alfonzo was recognized as one of Urban Land Institute's 40 under 40 best young land use professionals around the globe. Additionally, she was awarded a Fulbright to examine walkability in China in the Fall of 2013, where she focused on the socio-cultural and policy challenges to implementing walkable development. Dr. Alfonzo is a Research Assistant Professor at New York University, where she's been since 2011, and has taught courses around entrepreneurship, career, and leadership development, as well as urban design. Dr. Alfonzo has a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning with an emphasis on Urban Design and Behavior, as well as a professional Masters in Urban Planning, from the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and Psychology from the University of Miami.

Corey Ashby, State of Place

Corey Ashby is a software and research engineer with experience in image and video processing, graphics, cloud media systems, and software development. His work has spanned computer vision and perceptual imaging research, GPU-accelerated image processing, video encoding and compression, cloud-based media pipelines, and developer-focused software systems. At State of Place, he contributes software engineering expertise to the development of scalable technologies for extracting and analyzing built-environment data from street-level imagery.

Evan Taylor, Arizona Center for Algae Technology & Innovation (AzCATI), Arizona State University

Evan Taylor advises and mentors early stage startups from vertical farming to performing arts centers, judges business plan competitions, and mentors student entrepreneurs out of University of Washington and Arizona Sate University entrepreneurship programs. Purpose-driven business leader with global experiences and over a decade recruiting, managing, and leading talented multi-disciplinary teams to work on some of the world’s most pressing problems. Directly responsible for raising over $1M in biotech R&D funding annually and bringing technologies from the idea stage to the industrial or municipal scale. Deep financial modeling and investment experience on over $4 billion dollars of commercial and residential projects as well as due diligence deep dives into energy and industrial investments and acquisitions. Evan has previously won or been a finalist in the Mass Challenge, VentureWell E-Teams, Village Capital, Rice Business Plan Competition, MAC6 Conscious Capitalism, and CleanTech Open venture accelerator programs.

Benjamin Feuer, Department of Computer Science, Stanford

Ben Feuer is the post-training lead on the Marin project, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Percy Liang, a member of technical staff at OpenAthena, and a research fellow at Oumi. Before this, he co-lead the OpenThoughts-Agent project at Stanford with Ludwig Schmidt. Ben has completed an M.S. and Ph.D. at New York University supervised by Dr. Chinmay Hegde, and worked with AI startups Arthur AI and Abacus AI. He believes that AI is for everyone, and that it should be developed in the open.

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Published

2026-10-08

How to Cite

Rajshahi, M., Alfonzo, M., Ashby, C., Taylor, E., & Feuer, B. (2026). Vision Without Surveillance: Using Zero-Shot CLIP for Scalable Built Environment Feature Extraction. Street Art & Urban Creativity, 12(5), 691–708. https://doi.org/10.66838/sauc.6430

Issue

Vol. 12 No. 5 (2026)

Section

Research articles

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