Consequence Scanning in the City Modelling Lab

Considering the potential consequences of our services on people, communities and the planet

On the 18th of February 2020, we held our first Consequence Scanning workshop in Arup’s City Modelling Lab. We invited a range of experts to help conduct a holistic scan of our Lab’s vision. The goal of the session was to flag blind spots, risks and opportunities in our approach to building open, data-driven, behaviour-based tools for decision-makers in the built environment.

Some of what we identified we can act on, some we can influence, and some we will continue to monitor. What we can action, we are incorporating into our roadmap. A key outcome of the session was also to start a wider discussion related to the consequences of our vision. This is something that we are committed to returning to as we continue this work.

Consequence Scanning at Arup’s City Modelling Lab

About Consequence Scanning

Consequence Scanning is a workshop methodology for “responsible innovators,” developed by the good people at doteveryone.org.uk. It is a brilliant, light-weight framework that can be incorporated in the development life cycle of consumer products, digital services — and we wanted to test it with our research work. The format of a Consequence Scanning workshop is uncomplicated: each participant is asked to identify:

1. What are the intended and unintended consequences of this product or feature?
2. What are the positive consequences we want to focus on?
3. What are the consequences we want to mitigate?

We set the topic question:

When decision-makers in the built-environment have open, behaviour-based models of cities — what are the consequences?

Participants each noted down positive and negative consequences

Who contributed

We wanted to get a wide variety of perspectives to consider the consequences of our work. We were thrilled to be joined by members of local government (the Greater London Authority), members of a transportation authority (Transport for London), designers from the built environment (Applied Wayfinding) and data ethics (Projects by If), academia (The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis), and many Arup experts in energy, economics, transport planning, technology, and data science.

Thank you to all the participants who joined us for this first session! We could not have done it without you.

We are sure that we missed out important perspectives. We like to think this is the first of more consequence scanning sessions, and wider engagement to come.

We shared the consequences identified

Positive intended/unintended consequences

Some of the key areas of positive consequences that we want to support include:

• Open source tooling + community support: How do we support an open source community around ABMs for city modelling? What does our contribution look like? And where can we seek more partnerships (because we won’t have all the answers!)
• Datasets for other uses: We are concerned about “misuse by others” but we saw opportunity in unlocking data for wider, positive impacts and outcomes. How might the City Modelling Lab support this discovery?
• Better Decisions (wide impacts, more balance in definition of benefits): This is what is driving our work. We were glad that there was wider, group consensus that ABMs can support outcomes which increase people’s access to opportunities, decrease our dependency on carbon, and protect services for the most vulnerable in our communities. (Granted — we may be a self-selecting group with some inbuilt bias…)
• Equity: By building a more representative social model of our communities, we have a real opportunity to design cities with broader community inclusion. We want to keep this value core to our development work. And we want to apply this approach to specific challenges. If you are working on challenges of equity in the built environment, related to opportunity or service accessibility — please get in touch! We would be interested in working with you.

Negative intended/unintended consequences

Equally, we held rich conversations about the litany of potential negative consequences that we must be aware of, and mitigate where we have control or influence. We are not the sole authority on ABMs or open-tooling in city planning. We want to take responsibility for the decisions we make and the outcomes we contribute to. At the same time, we are only one part of the city planning ecosystem. It would be arrogant to think we could or should lead the design of mitigation solutions to some of the potential negative consequences of our work.

For the negative consequences we identified, we highlighted a few which we can act on, some which we can influence, and others which we will monitor.

Here are some of the “priority voted” themes we identified during the Consequence Scanning workshop:

• Experts: With complex models, there is an increasing skills-based-barrier to entry. How do we support cities to build capability with us? Is the cost of model complexity parity with vendor-lock-in, and how might we help mitigate this?
• Governance: What does governance around these models need to look like? Who needs to be involved in those conversations? / Misuse by others — What does “others” mean? What mechanisms might we consider, to set guardrails around how open, behaviour-based models are used? Should the rules for use change, if the model is for public or private gain?
• Bad data → Bad answers: We know that data quality is variable! How do we provide meaningful simulation scenarios, while identifying the confidence we have in the results? Does ‘better’ data exist in private companies? What are the conditions to share or use private data for public use — or public data for private use?
• Personal Data: We are living with the consequences of data-driven industries, who are incentivised to measure customer behaviour. We know the ubiquity of services that collect personal data about us, makes it challenging for individuals to exert control over what information they are giving away. This theme is relevant for both Governance and Bad data → Bad answers. It is something we will continue to monitor. We will also seek to participate in broader discussions about this topic.

Some of the consequences identified

Next steps

The consequence scanning workshop was our second experiment in opening up our Lab and our processes to wider engagement (our first experiment was this Medium publication!).

The consequence themes we identified in the workshop were largely aligned with consequences our Lab identified during a previous, internal assessment. This is reassuring because it helps validate our overall approach. But the opportunity to hear from a more diverse community of perspectives was critical in helping us to prioritise consequences — and broaden our own understanding of consequences.

Moving forward, we are committing to advancing the positive consequences and mitigating or influencing the negative consequences — through iterative steps, and action. Some actions in our short- to mid-term roadmap include:

1. Supporting open source tooling and open source communities. We will be hosting a London ABM Meetup on 19 March 2020. We are conducting a gap-analysis to identify what we need to do next, to contribute some of the tooling we have developed back into the open-source community.
2. Better decisions — we will continue to deliver work in partnership with cities, government, local councils, infrastructure bodies, and private industry — and we are prioritising partnerships that tackle challenges of equity and decarbonisation.
3. Experts — we would like to follow up with city governments about what practical mitigation measures they may have identified for this challenge. We will invite civil servants to participate in collaborative communities related to ABMs and city modelling. Please do get in touch if you want to join this conversation (citymodelling@arup.com)

Finally, we are creating a transparent roadmap! We will update this to reflect our development plans — and we hope it will be an opportunity for potential collaborators to identify opportunities, or challenges, for us to tackle together. We are looking forward to sharing it soon.