Generating realistic urban environments by scattering or placing buildings on maps is a challenging problem. Unlike the existing procedural methods, we employ a data-driven approach to this problem. We combine two recent advances in machine learning techniques, Generative Latent optimization (GLO) together with adversarial training, to learn a model that can easily generate and place buildings on a given map. Such a model enables its users, particularly artists, to easily generate areas with specific styles, e.g. residential or commercial, just by providing examples. In contrast, traditional procedural methods require lengthy manual tuning of hyper-parameters. Using a more flexible method like ours allows artists to iterate over their designs of urban layouts much faster. Finally, our experiments on real-world data show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in visual quality and can better match the underlying distribution of the building placements.
