The above is an aerial view of Chingeni in Balaka, which was posted on X by one user who goes by the name ‘Job Malawi’.

Using Google Gemini, we asked the AI chat-bot to use the above image to develop a model of what the town could look like if it were re-designed for the 21st century:-

Can you redesign this attached picture of Chingeni, in Balaka, in the Southern Region of Malawi into a bigger and more modern town like McCall in Idaho. Add facilities like a number of hotels, a number of restaurants, a big shopping centre, a cinema, a fire station, a police, a hospital, modern housing units, and other shops and services (city library, and assembly house). Just redesign the new town over the same type of terrain and preserve the roads as shown in the attached.

And this is what it came up with:

Can you see what we can see, the endless possibilities…

Can you imagine what a child growing up in the new town would experience, compared to a child growing up in the old town… how infinitely richer their life would be growing up in the new town?

Imagine if each town in the country was approached with a serious development agenda like this…reforestation and planting thousands of trees to turn the place into a lush green town, modern water system (maybe even boreholes to automatically water the plants) and provide water to the town, building 21st century infrastructure such as a functional and modern hospital, schools, offices, housing, factories and warehouses, a market, restaurants, a museum, a cinema and a modern sewage system. The amount of land it would free up for agriculture (mega-farms) and the like …

It’s not even a big place, but from the above picture, you can immediately see how it would work in practice as a town. The only thing I would change is maybe more solar panels on the roofs of the buildings, and possibly some additional sporting and entertainment facilites.

This image may have been created by an AI, but this is what real development looks like.