The latest issue of EDGE (183) features an excellent article on Automatic City Building for games. Focused on Gamr7, it details their middleware aimed at enabling artists to quickly design and create detailed urban environments.
The cities are grown based on the meaning of buildings according to activity. Cities are of course complex and this procedural approach is interesting, a movie detailing the system to date is embedded below:
Note the above movie is only indicative of earlier work, a new demo is coming soon but for now due to NDA's this is all the info we have.
We look forward to seeing the latest version...
Gamr7 aim to have a working release by mid 2008.