Artificial Intelligence in Participatory Planning
Merging Opinions and Questioning Development
For today I thought I would jot down some rapid thoughts on the topic of merging opinions in the context of planning. It will likely be eclectic and jump between different points within the area.
Reaching an agreement
The point to a participatory process seems often a teleological goal, particularly in building or planning processes which I am quite concerned with these days. Should it be built in the first place? Why here and now seems pertinent with the larger planning regulations. There are different levels where planning is being undertaken, and today I attempted to look into the different levels locally in Norway.
There is (1) a national document outlining expectations, (2) a regional planning strategy; (3) communal and planning program; (4) regulation plan; (5) building application. There are rather a few steps going between these different instances and usually it ends up into a process in the real world.
Reaching an agreement does not seem to stop by all of these steps of course, and it is mentioned that power players do work locally as politician sometimes on behalf of citizens or property developers to facilitate within or outside of the flexible frameworks that at time makes up the planning and building laws. The conflicts seems to arise on the regulation level between the building application and local regulation.
As is shown by this figure (in Norwegian) there is a possibility for the builders to somewhat ignore the regulation plan. When a concrete plan becomes more clear there is a higher likelihood that people will disagree with what has been planned built. Maarit Kahila-Tani in Reshaping the planning process using local experiences attempts to draw upon existing research from Brown and lays it out in an interesting matter, dividing the collective and individual.
In her writing she seeks to develop a framework for participatory planning support system. As such systems to assist in the process of planning.
In her writing she mentions Maptionnaire a few times, a map based survey. The idea of these planners is to attempt to get an understanding of what people think of their environment.
Digging into their different approaches I can see a wish to move towards a platform that has a lot of technology integrated. However there seems to be a lack of expertise or funding — as such they end up with websites that seem a lot like reports that previously have been produced (slightly more clickable). A wish seems to be to get a grip of larger amounts of data to produce planning insight and ensure a form of inclusion or democratic participation in local political decisions.
Let us for a second or two imagine that they had access to tools that could ‘align’ opinions. It would be fascinating to think about all the potential issues that could arise in a small neighbourhood alone. Then again the current processes cannot take a larger set of opinions into considerations (or I assume so), although people talk there is a cliché of white-haired men at planning meetings (allmøte) which sometimes is the only mandatory activity property developers sometimes have to perform.
If there was an amalgamation of opinions what would it look like?
If machine learning focused on text was used to gather and synthesise opinions in certain categories that could be possible. We could imagine a combination of text analysis as well as chat bots to generate different type of inputs. If artificial intelligence, so to speak, was used — would it be any improvement at all?
Sentiment analysis seems a course of action in this regard. It is the process of computationally identifying and categorising opinions expressed in a piece of text, especially in order to determine whether the writer’s attitude towards a particular topic, product, etc. is positive, negative, or neutral. If you could do such a thing then you could generate a heat-map of the dismay in a given area.
Then again this heatmap may be a reproduction of the same interest only intensified (of the old white-haired men), then again if it was a digital tool you could dare to think that other groups may get involved. It is currently possible for me to check my local plans in the public records online. As such I can search for my street and look at all the plans that are being discussed in my local area by the government. This can be said to be an unparalleled degree of government transparency and the Norwegian government must be applauded for this effort.
There seems to be possibilities here for getting an easier overview of your area. I have seen tools being developed by companies in Norway that creates a map easy to look at, although again — Norway is already using these type of frameworks or tools freely available to citizens. I can access regulation plans on the Internet to discover what type of regulations that can be seen in my area if I am particularly curious or worried.
So back to gathering opinions or reaching an agreement. It seems highly possible to integrate map-based questionnaire tools for the Norwegian government, however the question is if they should have a large in-house team doing this or invest in Maptionnaire with close follow or the Norwegian company Spacemaker AI for that sake. I heard that Spacemaker AI had moved towards collaborating with the Norwegian state already (rumour of course), as such we may perhaps expect movements in this direction in the near future. Another interesting case is the city bicycles in Oslo and the open data.
Can we say that movements is opinions or is that too passive? An opinion is a view or judgement formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge. It can be a generally held view or made by an expert. In this regard who is an expert? In the new project aforementioned (Folketråkk) people are categorised (common practice in user experience or service design) into citizen, municipality, architect, property developer and politician. These seem the obvious users from a design agency or government standpoint. Citizen is a broad category, are they not all citizens, or do they have to lack power to be citizens — not involved in the process perhaps?
It is not easy to understand first if we categorise and then if we analyse what to gain. If it is a kindergarten or a shopping mall a lot of opinions seem made prior to any type of participatory arrangement. I have adapted a model from the Green Building Council that shows project phases, the curve for dialogue and cost associated with change.
If building projects have participatory elements as required per building regulations or voluntarily initiated it seems most are located towards the later stages of the project.
- How early can we detect what is happening in our neighbourhood and have an opinion about it?
- If we have an opinion how is it categorised, quantified or understood?
- If there are too many opinions can we use sentiment analysis to map a certain area based on different approaches?
- How can that be complemented with qualitative insight?
- If the process of participation has worked perfectly and something has been suggested to change — accepted by the developer, how late in the project was this done?
When opinions are formed it certainly raises questions of the probability of having them recognised. Opinion derives after all from Old French opinion “opinion, view, judgements founded upon probabilities” as such we are attempting to calculate based on certain heuristics. People working in environments with code or programming often operate on heuristics or opinions that are reflected in how these solutions are made or implemented.
That is certainly worth taking into consideration when a solution is being built,
– but that is of course simply my opinion.
This is day 90 of #500daysofAI. My current focus for day 50–100 is on AI Safety. If you enjoy this please give me a response as I do want to improve my writing or discover new research, companies and projects.
