Ise Shrine is the most important Shinto shrine in Japan. According to Shinto tradition, the shrine‘s main buildings are rebuilt every 20 years according to precise plans and original traditional technology. The current buildings were completed in 2013. The next, the 63rd copy of the shrine is expected to be completed in 2033. The physical construction of the temple takes eight years and will therefore begin in 2025. For this the Yamaguchi Matsuri event will be held on March 2025.

The local community of Ise citizens would like to connect this date with the initiation of the revitalization of the city, especially its public spaces. This participative collaboration is made possible by the local connection to Meijo University Nagoya, with which Technical University of Liberec has regularly collaborated on joint architectural workshops since 2016. The international student urban and scenario planning workshop should not only bring an urban vision and architectural proposals and solutions to public spaces, but also open a discussion over the proposals to this topic across the local community and municipality.

The workshop will be focused on the use of NBS (nature-based solutions) in public space, to solve the increasingly topical problems with UHI (urban heat island), from which, thanks to climate change, suffer today‘s urban residents not only in Japanese cities. And will consider the topic of promoting walkability by upgrading the quality of public spaces. This workshop would also be an opportunity to introduce and test with the students the use of the latest method of working on an urban planning project, which is recently being developed as part of the research project at Technical University of Liberec and Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Specifically, it involves testing the working version of the forthcoming AI software, digital neural network Virtual futurologist A°D°A, which is combining the possibilities of AI (LLM - large language models) and the futurological method of scenario planning with urban structural planning.

From Japan, students of Prof. Makoto Tanida from MUN, then students of Ing Arch. Maciej Lasocki from Warsaw University of Technology, Poland and students related to Arch. Juan Rufino Castillo Molina, Dr. Eng. from UNPHU, Dominican Republic are expected to participate in the workshop, along with representatives of the local community in Ise. On behalf of the Czech side, project initiator and workshop leader Zdeňka Němcová Zedníčková (TUL) and AI project coresearcher Jana Bernartová (AVU) should participate together with four Czech students of Architecture.