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Artificial Intelligence in Urban Planning: Risks and Opportunities - AcSS Policy Briefing
Ulrich Graute • Jun 21, 2024
IAG Briefing Series
This briefing series by the International Advisory Group of the Academy of Social Sciences of the United Kingdom seeks to bring an international dimension to the Academy’s policy positions and identify interdisciplinary solutions to complex challenges facing society from a global standpoint.
Overview
Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents global societal challenges for researchers and policymakers. Machines have long been shown to be beneficial where their actions can be expected to achieve the objectives sought by human beings and not by machines with minds of their own. The goal for AI research is to create a system that requires no problem-specific engineering but can be assigned to carry out tasks such as teaching a molecular biology class or running a government.
Given the highly complex, multi-stakeholder dialogue and decision-making processes involved, the application of AI in the context of urban planning is of particular interest for researchers from a wide range of hybrid disciplines spanning physical and human geography, political economy, public administration, socio-legal studies, social policy and anthropology. The territory of cities is the stage where developments leave their physical footprint. Properly planned urban development requires an integrative and participatory decision-making process that addresses competing interests and is linked to a shared vision, an overall development strategy and national, regional and local urban policies. In practice, this is a continuous and iterative process, facilitating and articulating political decisions based on different scenarios and translating those decisions into actions that will transform the physical and social space and support the development of integrated cities and territories.
Throughout the urban planning process, each of the many persons and institutions affected by a plan may pursue their own interests, their priorities may shift, new issues and policies may emerge, and
actors may join constellations with specific motivations, interests and capabilities. Nobody in the process is likely to have full information, and no single person is 100 per cent rational in his or her perceptions and actions. Very little knowledge is certain, especially regarding the future. These limitations make planning a complex enterprise. They explain why its processes often generate suboptimal results, why constant reviewing of plans is necessary, and why the authors of the International Guidelines on Urban and territorial Planning IGUTP understand urban and territorial planning ultimately as a continuous and iterative decision-making process. The hope is now that AI tools can help to develop and implement better urban plans and ultimately increase the quality of life in cities. But urban planners also ask: should AI be seen just a technical tool, a digital twin, or could AI even become a controlling factor co-piloting city planning?
Key evidence
Currently, no general-purpose AI urban planning programme exists that does everything. Instead, developers are building and experimenting with different types of agent programmes designed to address different types of problems. Three scenarios can be identified to describe the positioning of AI in future urban planning:
- Urban planning by AI increases control over life in cities: In the worst-case scenario, AI will be programmed to ignore the objectives and preferences of citizens. By targeting the lowest common denominator, it may instead lead to lower standards of quality of life and levels of urban sustainability, while surveillance and control might be added to the objectives of AI applications as major planning objectives, threatening to reduce or destroy freedoms of citizens.
- AI serves as a technical tool and assistant for planners: This second configuration is often presented as the preferred scenario. Here, AI is strictly limited to functioning as a technical tool without power over humans, with AI applications filling data gaps and writing intelligent concept papers that generate problem trees and shorten the time needed to generate ideas. AI applications are given access to all applicable national and local visions, policies, laws, rules and regulations, including building codes, design guidelines, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, the objectives of stakeholders and budgetary information, as well as best practice cases from other cities. Based on this cumulative body of knowledge, AI applications can, and increasingly often already do, generate design proposals, and textual descriptions of plans. They may even suggest how to reconcile competing interests, making it difficult to tell whether they are created by a human being or by AI.
- AI serves as a digital twin providing planners with alternative options: Machines may be far more capable than humans but are likely to remain far from perfect. AI as a digital twin can support planning departments to keep processes on track. However, if humans put the wrong objectives into a machine that is able to learn and is more intelligent than they are, it will achieve the objective regardless of any unwanted and unintended consequences. As planners get used to data and recommendations from AI, it can gradually gain influence over humans and become a co-pilot or at least a digital twin in planning rather than being treated as a tool.
Policy contexts
In urban planning, the process takes years from the development of operational plans through to their implementation and evaluation. We are only beginning to understand generative AI’s capabilities and risks; the long-term impact on AI on the entire process remains to be seen. But our three scenarios have already been adopted by urban planners in advanced societies across three categories: sceptics who are cautious and largely opposed to the development of new technologies; optimists who are convinced that AI will be beneficial if used exclusively as technical tools unable to gain control over humans; and realists who are interested in the benefits of AI but who are also aware of the risks.
The success or otherwise of the introduction of new technologies is found to be dependent on a mix of contextual factors. Not every city has the best equipped planning department or the technical resources for sound planning. This situation often arises in fast-urbanising countries in the Global South, in cities with high numbers of foreign refugees or internally displaced persons. In addition, the degree of authority for urban planning delegated to cities varies a lot between countries and even where provision for AI exists, political decision-makers may use them as a political tool by including biases or discriminatory patterns in their outcomes.
Recommendations
AI researchers are predicting that AI will progressively penetrate all spheres of life. Research into the most effective use and the impacts of AI in the urban planning process remains at an early stage, and no final conclusions are available. To prepare for the challenges and risks associated with AI:
- Social scientists, politicians and the general public must be prepared to anticipate and adapt to the impact of AI on whole societies and political systems.
- Planners need to explore risks and opportunities of AI applications as technical tools, and as co-pilots that are capable of gaining influence over perceptions and actions of humans, or of becoming a dominant tool for the control of cities and citizens’ lives.
- Citizens need to be given insights into planning and decision-making processes beginning with the way objectives and preferences are programmed into machines.
- Given the magnitude, complexity and interrelatedness of the challenges facing society, researchers must prevent a new culture war with Luddites wrecking learning machines.
- Instead, scientists and policymakers across the world should learn how to use wisely- governed AI to increase the much-needed problem-solving capacity of cities and beyond.
Policies and Governance for Resilient and Sustainable Cities and Regions
Privacy Communicting with AI raises privacy concerns A CV is personal documents including private information you may not want to share with everybody. Therefore, the sending of your CV to somebody (eg as part of an application or business offer) is usually considered as confidential. Using generative AI, for instance ChatGPT, to work on your CV, website or LinkedIn profile should be carefully considered because the info you share about yourself with ChatGPT stays with ChatGPT even if you delete it from your account after you finished your conversation. Nonetheless, I decided to take it easier using AI because my profile and CV is no secret in anyway. Through dozens of publications since the 1990s, speeches at many conferences worldwide, as blogger with an own website (www.ugraute.de) and a LinkedIn profile with close to 6000 followers you can find everything what’s written in my CV somewhere on the internet. And, most importantly, I carefully review everything that AI suggests to me, I review and finalize texts before I use them. While I cannot fully exclude misuse of information, the responsibility for the content of my website and CV remains with me. And I still use a CV version not aided by AI for business offers and applications. AI as a second eye - When should you consider using AI to review your CV and profile? After 16 years of mostly (but not only) working for the United Nations I am now shifting more attention beyond the UN to the private sector, national and local authorities, other international organizations, NGOs etc. All UN agencies have their own mandates, interests and priorities. As UN staffer and later as UN consultant I learnt the rules of the institution and lived with the limitations they generate for management and goal achievement. However, the UN, with its historical baggage of countless mandates, inadequate structures and resources and some overly cautious employees, at times stands in its own way. I want to continue supporting global cooperation using my global perspective, my skills in project and program management, cross-cultural communication, policy analysis and stakeholder cooperation. However, it is time to refocus and look at my skills and achievements from a different, a non-UN perspective. This is where AI comes into play as an additional opportunity to support the reorientation of my or your career. AI supports my own reflections on my interests and strategy and it does it in a very inspirational way. I recommend the same to others but, if possible, it should be only an opportunity in addition to exchange with friends, colleagues, books, trainers, coaches etc. How did I use Chat GPT to review my website and CV? ChatGPT is a conversational tool, and it’s for free in its basic version. You can login here: https://chatgpt.com/auth/login. After opening an account and login you find a box where you can enter you question (called prompt). You push Enter and get an answer within seconds. If the answer is not inspirational, correct or satisfying you just go on submitting a new or modified prompt. This way conversations with ChatGPT becomes conversational and easy. In this process ChatGPT gets to know you better and learns from your prompts. Prompting, ie formulating the right questions is key to get useful answers out of the conversation and it’s worth to spend some time training how to prompt. In my case, an earlier prompt submitted to ChatGPT had produced already this suggestion: “Adjust your communication style to match the language and expectations of non-UN clients, avoiding overly technical or UN-specific jargon.” That was the point when ChatGPT confirmed my own guess that I have to change communication when I look beyond the UN world. To further explore this, I submitted additional prompts including this one: “ChatGPT, please rewrite my CV in a style more appealing to private companies.” The answer after my own review and fine tuning produced the short CV version which you can find here: https://www.ugraute.de/bio-and-cv Could I have produced this without AI? Of course, I have produced two pages versions of my CV on my own. The point is, that many things which are super important at the UN as “ an animal of its own kind ” are not so relevant outside of the UN. In such situations it may take a lot of time to decide what to leave in and what to take out of your CV. A second eye like AI proposing specific cuts and a repackaging can be very inspirational and helpful to get a fresh and crispier look at your own experience and credentials. I also liked very much that ChatGPT explained its approach to me: “To make your CV more appealing to private companies, I'll focus on making the language more dynamic, emphasizing your key achievements, leadership roles, and strategic impact. I'll also streamline the format for clarity and brevity.” Of course, I reviewed the suggested version of my CV and other website texts revised by AI to confirm the correctness of the content. Overall, this review exercise is a test to use a new technical tool. It is certainly inspirational. Success remains to be seen but that is also the case when I review my CV for an application or if I review my website in a traditional way. I decided for an open approach to use AI and to talk about my personal experience in this post, because in this new wave of innovation, we are all learners and can help each other. As adviser, I like to share, teach, and keep learning, inside or outside of the UN.
Figure: Human-in-the-loop intervention. ‘The Ethical Concerns of Artificial Intelligence in Urban Planning’ Thomas W. Sanchez, Marc Brenman, and Xinyue Ye (2024)
Human Compatible - AI and the Problem of Control
A slide from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) presented at the opening of HLPF highlights that only 17% of the SDG targets are on track
Background and Objectives The Gerd Albers Award (GAA) is celebrating inspiring publications such as books and essays. It was established in 1999 in honor of Professor Gerd Albers, a co-founder and past president of ISOCARP, who placed a particular emphasis on the task of publishing as a means of elucidating both the current debate and practical achievements in the planning field. This reputable award is given for the high-quality academic publications written by ISOCARP members. Eligible entries Pertinent submissions include the following publications by ISOCARP members published in the period between July 1, 2023, and June 31, 2024: • Books and/or Book chapters • Journal articles • Published project reports Exhibition catalogues and/or unpublished reports are ineligible. Unpublished journal articles are eligible if the publisher’s acceptance letter is attached to the article submitted. Evaluation criteria Content: • Thematic introduction • Contribution to discussions on the topic • Consistence and coherence (conceptual background, methodological approach) • Target audience Design: • Clarity • Technical requirements • Production Language All languages are eligible, although the “official languages” of the Society are English, French, German, and Spanish. Non-English entries must have an extended abstract in English (min. 3 pages). Jury The jury consists of three members of the ISOCARP Scientific Committee and the A&P Program Director. The deliberations and votes of the jury are confidential. Prof. Sebnem Hoskara Dr. Ulrich Graute Dr. Dorota Kamrowska-Załuska Prof. Ali A. Alraouf (A&P Program Director) Substance of the Award The Award is bestowed in three categories: GAA ‘Best Book’, GAA ‘Best Article’ and Special Mention. The Award winners are announced during the official ceremony at the ISOCARP annual World Planning Congress. GAA ‘Best Book’ and GAA ‘Best Article’ get two years of free membership to ISOCARP, official ISOCARP award certification and its dissemination through the ISOCARP website, social media and newsletter. Special Mention gets an official ISOCARP award certification and its dissemination through the ISOCARP website, social media and newsletter. Who is eligible? • Scholars • Writers • Book Authors • Researchers • Urban and City Critics • Professors and Academics Prize • Recognition at the ISOCARP 60th Congress in Siena at the Awards Special Session. • Certificate. • ISOCARP Medal. • Waiving form the registration for a single representative of the winners. • One year Membership at ISOCARP for a single representative of the winners. Registration fee 150 Euros for each entry in the Best Book Award (a candidate can apply with multiple proposals). 50 Euros for each entry in the Best Paper Award (a candidate can apply with multiple proposals). Submission material ⦁ Contribution (book/chapter/article) in pdf format Application procedure 1. Submit your online application https://isocarp.org/gerd-albers-award-2024-submission-form/ 2. Pay the registration fee: 150 Euros for Best Book Award and 50 Euros for Best Paper Award 3. Please, send your application to Ali Alraouf, ISOCARP Board member (alialraouf@isocarp.org) and ISOCARP HQ (awards@isocarp.org). Kindly specify the email subject: GAA 2024 Candidature. Deadline for submission August 15, 2024 Submit your application here https://isocarp.org/gerd-albers-award-2024-submission-form/
International Organizations like the UN are struggling if not failing to cope with the many crises - but can I do any better as independent advisor?
ISOCARP Cyber Agora #10
The United Nations is preparing for its Summit of the Future and hopes for a Pact for the Future bring the SDG implementation and multilateralism back on Track as main outcome of the Summit scheduled for September of this year in New York. Can that become a success and bring multilateral cooperation and SDG goal achievement back on track? The UN describes 'Halfway through the 2030 Agenda, the world is not on track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. It is not too late to change course, if we all rethink, refocus, and recharge. “UN 2.0” encapsulates the Secretary-General's vision of a modern UN family, rejuvenated by a forward-thinking culture and empowered by cutting-edge skills for the twenty-first century – to turbocharge our support to people and planet.'[1] The UN certainly will try but at the end progress will depend on the political will of member states and there is not much visible until now. On May 7, 2024 Parag Khanna, Founder & CEO of AlphaGeo, Strategic Advisor and Bestselling Author, published in Noema his paper The Coming Entropy Of Our World Order. He writes in his analysis: ‘Indeed, the most accurate description of today’s world is high entropy, in which energy is dissipating rapidly and even chaotically through the global system. In physics, entropy is embodied in the Second Law of Thermodynamics (pithily summed up in a Woody Allen film as: “Sooner or later, everything turns to shit”). Entropy denotes disorder and a lack of coherence.’ But for Khanna entropy is not anarchy. Instead, entropy ‘is a systemic property that manifests itself as a growing number of states and other actors seize the tools of power, whether military, financial or technological, and exercise agency within the system. There is still no consensus as to what to name the post-Cold War era, but its defining characteristic is clear: radical entropy at every level and in every domain of global life. How do we reconcile an increasingly fractured order with an increasingly planetary reality?’ It's worth reading the full paper where he welcomes the reader to the Global Middle Ages as a very complex geopolitical marketplace. He expects that what will matter much more than sovereignty, then, is capacity as measured by coherence, agency and resilience. States will no longer hold monopoly over the tools of physical violence. The future he envisages far more resembles the pre-Westphalian patterns of Hanseatic Leagues than ‘today’s Potemkin sovereign assemblies such as the United Nations’. According to him it is hard to find anybody who really cares for multilateralism. More visible is that every state fights for herself. Khanna also asks: 'If institutionalized orders such as the late 20th-century multilateral system tended to be established only after major wars, would an entropic drift into regional spheres of influence be preferable to a World War III among dueling hegemons? In this scenario, conflicts may flare from Ukraine to Taiwan, but they would be ring-fenced within their respective regions rather than becoming tripwires for global conflict. Regions that strive for greater self-sufficiency, such as North America and Europe today, could reduce the carbon intensity of their economies and trade, but potentially at the cost of undermining their interdependence with and leverage over other regions. Such is the double-edged nature of an entropic world. With no major power able to impose itself on the global system or able to reign in those transnational actors domiciled abroad or in the cloud, the future looks less like a collective of sovereign nations than a scattered tableau of regional fortresses, city-states and an archipelago of islands of stability connected through networks of mobile capital, technology and talent. To argue that there is some bedrock Western-led order underpinning the global system rather than crumbling inertia is tantamount to infinite regress'. Who considers Khanna a negativist should read also the end of his paper: 'Global entropy doesn’t solely imply fragmentation. To the contrary, the system exhibits characteristics of self-organization, even aggregation, into new patterns and formations. Highways, railways, electricity grids and airlines link cities in ways that form neo-Hanseatic networks and alliances, and the internet transcends borders to link self-governing social communities. The universal reach and penetration of connectivity enables authorities of all kinds to forge bonds effectively more real than the many states that exist more on maps than in their peoples’ reality. The world comes together — even as it falls apart.' I would like to read more on how the self-organization into new patterns and formations will work successfully and prevent the world from falling apart. For that we may have to wait for his next book. In the meantime, we should ask ourselves what we can do to get ready for the future. The Summit of the Future and UN 2.0 are unlikely to proof more than that the UN is not dead. Entangled in its old procedures and the current multi challenge environment it would be unrealistic to expect more. What could help as a starter is to develop and test new forms of Model UN, i.e. the simulation of how international cooperation can work in a world described by Parag Khanna. I would be interested. Back to the post on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/posts/graute_the-future-of-the-united-nations-and-the-activity-7194007832390750208-Brqe?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop Footnotes [1] https://www.un.org/two-zero/en [2] Link to Parag Khanna's full paper https://www.noemamag.com/the-coming-entropy-of-our-world-order/
The KPMG Future Summit event on AI which I attended on 23 April 2023 [1] did not address directly urban and territorial planning or international cooperation in the field. I was listening to the online event while ironing my shirts (unfortunately, that’s not done by AI yet). What caught my attention was among others the statement by Miriam Kugel, Director of People Science Advisory for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Microsoft. She said that AI will be in future like our co-pilot. While many admin tasks will be taken over by AI more managerial oversight by managers will be needed. Just imagine all the rules and regulations that have to be consider in planning a city can be considered and factored in by AI. It still will need the planners to identify the best proposals and recommend them to politicians for decision-making. Chris Chiancone, Chief Information Officer at the City of Carralton suggests regarding the use of AI in planning to ‘Picture a tool that can absorb data about a city's current layout, population density, infrastructure, and other factors, and then generate a model of how the city could be restructured to optimize certain objectives.’ Chris Chiancone writes in his paper of 20 June 2023 ‘Revolutionizing Urban Planning with Generative AI: A new Era of Smart Cities’ [2] : “At its heart, Generative AI is a type of machine learning that crafts new data instances reflecting its training set. Picture a master artist who, rather than simply duplicating a scene, employs their creativity to produce unique, lifelike outputs from a given input. That's the magic of Generative AI, but in the realm of data. It's the digital world's virtuoso, wielding algorithms and computational power instead of brushes and pigments”. For Chiancone Generative AI brings a unique fusion of creativity and efficiency to urban planning. It's akin to having a supercharged assistant that can process numbers, analyze data, generate models, and make predictions at a pace and scale that humans simply can't compete with. All of this is done with the aim of creating more efficient, habitable, and sustainable cities. According to Chiancone Generative AI is a tool that's not just revolutionizing urban planning, but also holds the potential to significantly enhance the quality of life in our urban habitats. And that ‘supercharged assistant’ corresponds to Miriam Kugels ‘co-pilot’. In spite of all creativity, Chiancone and Kugel understand AI as supportive tools (assistant or co-pilot) and that it needs data strategies, AI governance and capacity building to keep the pilot on track to intended goals. Scenario planning could be one of the big beneficiaries of AI. The planner as pilot of the planning process can modify the scenario setting and ask AI to develop the best scenario accordingly. This way, planners and decision-makers can better test out different options before taking a decision. Now let’s think ahead a bit further. If AI can support scenario planning AI can also support the inter-sectoral and multi-level coordination of planning process which are often loaded with conflicting interests. AI could extend the scenario planning and apply a Large Language Model to include also all policies, laws and regulations of other relevant policy fields, policy levels plus the rights of citizens and property owners affected by a plan. By combining and comparing all these data AI could either identify win-win situations or generate proposals to bridge conflicting positions. It still will need the planning process and the decision-making but AI could support this process significantly by assuring that all relevant policies, rules and regulations are taken into account. And if new challenges and opportunities emerge, they can be included to proposed scenarios without much delay. And planners assisted by their ‘co-pilot’ might become even more reliable and appreciated authorities in the planning process. [1] https://kpmg.com/de/de/home/events/uebersicht/kpmg-zukunftsgipfel.html [2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/revolutionizing-urban-planning-generative-ai-new-era-smart-chiancone/ AI and the interrelated web of sustainable development goals Since 2012 I am working on the post 2015 development agenda of the United Nations which is since 2015 called 2030 Agenda and it includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals with 169 targets. The Agenda is currently off-track but what puzzles me since its launch is how to we can keep track of the fact that goals and targets are an interrelated web. Progress on one goal or target may imply regression on others. How can a zero-sum game or an overall regression be prevented? Here too, AI offers opportunities. The Human Settlements Programme of the United Nations (UN-Habitat) launched in 2022 its report “AI and Cities” [3] . This first more comprehensive review of the relation between AI, cities and urban planning includes among others the recommendation to align AI strategies with SDGs and National and Local Goals (UN-Habitat 2022 AI and Cities, page 100). [3] https://unhabitat.org/sites/default/files/2022/10/artificial_intelligence_and_cities_risks_applications_and_governance.pdf
AI is to be understood as a combination of hardware, software and (this is new!) learning. If you have a virus software on your computer a virus scanner may identify and remove the virus. Now imagine, your virus would be AI enhanced and able to learn and modify itself. Virus scanners may not be able to identify self-modifying viruses and the virus could keep learning, remain undetected and increase damage without limits. That’s scary and that’s why data strategies and AI governance by governments, providers and users is necessary. Would a world without AI be a better place? As an expert in international cooperation, urban and regional development I am sceptic. We’re living in times of multiple and often interrelated and interdependent crises. There is an international system of multi-level and multilateral rule-based cooperation and this system generates complex programmes like the UN 2030 Agenda with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals and 168 targets. In spite of such programmes and centuries of experience in diplomacy the human system is not able (yet) to prevent war, mitigate climate change, remove high inequality and assure a sustainable development which leave no one behind. Our governments, societies and we as individuals are experienced in solving single issue problems but the current complexity is growing, already now overwhelming and our capacities are slow in growing up to the many challenges. In this situation (a well governed and strategised) artificial intelligence which helps us to understand complexity and to identify solutions for our challenges could be the change-maker we need.