While cities’ population is continuing to grow, institutions are demanding more sustainability inurban development. This contradiction leads to a great increase in the complexity of urban planning. Theneed to consider social, legal, environmental, and economic parameters challenges the traditional urbanplanning processing in favor to an optimized and automated process. Generative design as a digital solutionhas the potential to optimize the design phase by automatically generating spatial design solutions andanalyzing them in the design phase. The objective of this research is to analyze the traditional urban planning process and to compare it with a digitalized driven process by using generative design. This study usesa mixed approach with four research methods: document analysis, survey, interviews and a case studybased in Sweden. The critical analysis of the Swedish urban planning process allows to define the mainbarriers to a digitalized process. Results also show the benefits of using generative design for a more sustainable and faster design process. Two main conclusions can be made from this study: institutional andorganizational changes are necessary to achieve digitalization, and generative design proves to be a usefultool that should be considered to support the digitalization of urban planning.