AI in urban planning - and in planning education in particular

The American Planning Association (APA) in 2021 established the “AI in Planning” Foresight Community which, over ten months, surveyed and interrogated and analyzed and contemplated/deliberated upon the unfolding relationship between advances in artificial intelligence (AI) such as machine learning and the planning profession (this report tells you all you need to know for now - the technical details, big-picture developments, and ethical debates/dilemmas). This blog covers the core conversations and contributes my views on AI in planning education from the perspectives of both teacher and learner.

The AI project in planning seeks to harness the computer’s overwhelming power in gathering and processing data input, including that on its own performance, extracting patterns, and performing calculations through digital replication of the planning logic. The prevailing understanding and consensus appear to be that 1) the technology will out-consume and out-power any resistance in its redefining the field much in the same nature as, only even more comprehensively than, geographical information systems (GIS) a few decades ago, and 2) its responsible use requires that planners learn its inner workings and, when applicable or appropriate, utilize its capabilities to make decisions and model projections for human settlements and communicate its operations to the affected communities. The creation by APA of its team of experts reflects the recognition that if planners are unprepared, they could either miss out on all the answers and solutions or misuse its output. Right now, the outlook is that technological advancement, largely in the private sector, will vastly outpace its adaptation for policy and planning in the public sector and scrutiny of its capability to do so effectively by universities and nonprofits.

The current disconnects hampering the effective use of AI by planners across all domains as identified by the academic experts through a combination of meta studies and case studies can be pinpointed at these particular loci of “dissonance”:

1) between any of a planner’s desire/will (what problem am I trying to solve), comfort/capacity (how well can I use the tool at hand), and awareness/comprehension (how appropriate is the tool to the purpose, and what is its limitation): until planners can unequivocally define exactly the procedures, goals, and core values motivating all decisions and choices in their scope of practice, AI will always remain an unstable concoction of uncertainty and powerful potential for mishap/mischief.

2)  between private sector priorities, which shape the technology’s development and deployment, and public sector imperatives, which form the bottom line of re-distributive justice and co-existential compact.

3) between the respective timescales of innovation, financing/entrepreneurship institutional building and capital/labor routing, and knowledge production on its methodological possibilities and ethical implications across the various spaces or sectors – academic, nonprofit, governmental, corporate, tribal etc.

4) between the respective cognitive spaces of planners and their communities – be they settlements, workspaces, classrooms, or legislatives.

In essence, moving forward requires bridging the perception-understanding gaps around any social spaces where AI is relevant or a potentially advisable/preferable direction and taking assessment of what we know and don’t know about what we will and won’t do.

I’ve delighted in reading the cases of AI’s pilot for solving long-standing problems over humane and just resource allocation. I await large-scale, replicable studies of its effectiveness as a governance tool in all spheres of social existence. And we are all part of a nascent experiment with a hitherto unknown set of circumstances – namely, an epistemological transformation superimposed on various inherited structural dysfunctions…

- one of which being deficiencies in our teaching and instruction of the fundamentals of math and computing and philosophy and reasoning. That our entire education system in the country and parts beyond requires an overhaul is besides the point, but the only limit to perfecting planning educational programs’ purpose for preparing AI-knowledgeable prospective planners is lack of political will to overcome/disrupt institutional rigidity or inertia. What I’m trying to say, we have the individual and institutional capacity in our existing systems for producing things – knowledge included – to implement the leading recommendations, just that outdated thinking needs to move out of the way.

As a new teacher of urban planning, I have been fiercely outspoken against the use of AI in any kind of instructional settings where learning – as in gaining true comprehension – is the primary goal. A machine designed by humans for computing – in the broadest possible sense of the term – human-generated data (even nature measurements are only meaningful to the extent humans deem it worthwhile to measure) can confirm the established conceptions or replicate/augment human actions/calculations or justify chosen recourses or predict forthcoming occurrences based on known likelihoods - that it can do so is meaningless or irrelevant for gaining deeper awareness of our worldly and outer-worldly relations.

In other words, it has no place in the learning process other than summarizing a ridiculous amount of data that no known biological organism can consciously do according to the metrics we have agreed on. For this reason, I find entertaining any notion of incorporating AI in the classroom of planning education utterly risky as human minds, young and old, are far too impressionable, and for good evolutionary reason, to be trusted with ex-poste knowledge reconstruction. (Besides, making predictions based on statistical/probabilistic models and then retracing the logic in the models makes learning like chasing one's tail, only much less fun). My advice for students at all stages of life is: don’t let AI deprive you of the opportunity to make the connection yourself; you can always ask it afterwards.

The implication from that last statement is that there’s no theoretical gap between a thinking thing made up of metallic or organic matter or whatever combination of substances. That our machines will produce ever closer approximations and eventually replicate human intuition and ingenuity and imagination is not a question but an inevitability. Good news is that we are always moving toward convergence or some sort of new equilibrium following any kind of disruptive cognitive/technological advances; the challenge is minimizing the damage on the way -- that our experimentation with various AI projects don’t cause unnecessary harm or suffering. Students who mistake AI for an aid to learning beyond simple fact-finding and pattern-summarizing simply have not noticed the delight of true learning. The goal for us educators in the classroom is to recall, reproduce, and reinforce those fleeting joyful moments of epiphany and revelation – like that one when you first discovered negative numbers as a child, of learning through love and human connection, and thereby put AI in its rightful place of serving simply as an efficient, aided self-correcting gyroscopic calculator, to be used only by those properly trained.

Googling “AI planning.org” will return all the current AI endeavors in urban planning – the first few results being  the newest publications on the current state of knowledge and application and deliberation, each providing links and citations to useful resources.

Community engagement, power, and planning ethics

PART I: ORGANIZERS - planners' ethics, public participation, and pragmatism

PART II: INTERMEDIARIES - power, conflict, and informality

PART III: CLIENTS - empowerment and willingness to participate

As with my first three-part blog series on tax incentives, this one can also be thought of as divided roughly into rationale, process, and impact among its three parts. Three points from the previous two blogs in the series are worth reiterating: first is the distinction between procedural and substantive goals for public participation – the latter can be further split into legitimacy for the organizers/planners, quality of communication between organizers and participants, and empowerment of participants; second is the limit of public formal planning functions in redistributing power – a substantive goal of participation; third is the socially constructed nature of knowledge, argumentative conception of rationality, and role of advocacy planning. For participation and related democratic institutions to be meaningful, there need to be substantial developmental outcomes, extra-state spaces for engagement, and emphasis on or appreciation for deliberative/dialectic processes involving the marginalized. This blog deals with these through the lens of willingness to participate.

More specifically, I talked about how planners can introduce distortions through their interjection in the community, but the level and pattern of engagement also the information planners have to work with. The problem with ensuring adequate representation is as old as the concept of public participation itself. A while back, our studio team was tasked with updating the comprehensive plan for a rapidly growing and ethnically divided jurisdiction. The stakeholders we interacted with, valuable as their insights are, are not representative of the whole community, and I was left with the uneasy feeling this mutual feedback of information void would undermine existing efforts that we failed to account for. And I wondered if our involvement further reinforced the unintentional exclusion of certain groups and gave rise to new spaces of contestation that we should be but never would be aware of.

This leads to the question: who participates? Many studies have looked into the predictors (check out this excellent article in the Journal of Planning American Association which also delves into the causes of non-participation). Clearly, people are more motivated to engage on decisions that impact them or issues that they care about. This implies that the presentation of the core problem or conflict also matters for participation in addition to the factors that have been identified to matter after the question has already been posed.

Recently I got to collaborate on a research project based on a survey conducted of residents’ risk perception, trust, knowledge, etc. regarding a wide range of policy issues, but particularly local environmental threats to public health. One question asked whether residents would be willing to spend time on an online forum hosted by their local government agencies to provide their input on environmental concerns. I was curious as to how willingness to participate is related to support for different types of policies or programs. Turns out that people who would opine tend to prefer system-level solutions like new regulations to individual-level solutions like new fines, and the difference is statistically significant. This suggests some type of link between proposals and participatory responses that is moderated by individual demographics, values, and world views.

Of course, this is just one example of the insights generated by a survey of this kind, but we can still ask: what are the implications for planners seeking to improve voice and representation in correspondence with the three points highlighted at the start of this post? First, a varied menu of policy options should accompany all iterations of solicitation of public input, so that the stakes of participation are clear, in addition to emphasizing the human development benefits of participatory action in itself. Second, multiple spaces for public input should be provided that vary in the amount of “control” or degree of moderation by planners or officials. Third, raising awareness for agent-system interactions should be a goal throughout the process, so that both planners and participants stay mindful of the reciprocal nature of most problems and the interconnectedness of factors.

Going back to the ethics of communication, planners must make an effort to understand resistance to participation that goes beyond lack of time, money, energy, and interest. Whether willingness translates to action is another matter altogether, but just willingness on its own is worth paying attention to because it could indicate deficiencies in the messaging -- i.e., in how a problem, plan, or proposal is presented and propagated throughout the planning process. In a way, this is a comforting thought -- that improving the means also improve the ends, that co-production of knowledge continually evolves with conversations.

Community engagement, power, and planning ethics

PART I: ORGANIZERS - planners' ethics, public participation, and pragmatism

PART II: INTERMEDIARIES - power, conflict, and informality

PART III: CLIENTS - empowerment and willingness to participate

I’ll start this one with my reaction to American Planning Association’s webinar on 2023.12.08 on conflict management in public meetings (the link will be added here once uploaded). The most useful thing I got out of it is the importance of understanding the core identities of stakeholders. What it failed to address is manipulation and abuse of power. While there was mention of “silent conflict” in which problems remain unspoken, it did not go into adequate depth into reasons silence besides just general shyness and reluctance to speak. Overall, there is a conflation of disruptive forces within a meeting due to various causes, which minimizes the role of planners to that of a mere facilitator whose job is to quelch the disruptions (though some of these certainly could use many of the strategies recommended) and keep the peace, when they can do so much more to challenge and change the status quo and enable more effective, reform-driven participation.

The toughest tasks in community development are usually tough because they involve deep-rooted grievances and stark inequities. There could be many intertwined incurrences of harm throughout history, but we will focus here on deliberate miscommunication in the present-day planning process and its use by planners in maintaining control and serving the prevailing interests. Last week’s blog cited S. Arnstein’s seminal (1969) work on characterizing the meaningfulness of public participation by the degree to which power gets redistributed. When participation is set up only to placate and persuade rather than discuss and deliberate, it does little to resolve the underlying tensions. Without adequate redistribution of power, the powerful party could dominate or refuse negotiation, causing conflicts to deepen and emotions like anger, distrust, and frustration to fester.

Since information is power, one of the most powerful ways to prevent power transfer is to withhold information from the party to which power is to be transferred until negotiation outcomes are no longer relevant to the final decisions, and that can take the form of silence in a public meeting. J. Forester (1982) discussed different levels of information management that planners might influence/leverage to either reinforce the power status quo or shift the existing distribution, despite having no direct influence on the structure itself. They can help level the information playing field – the constant self-reflection on biases and prejudices, as mandated by the American Institute of Certified Planners' Code of Ethics mentioned in the previous blog, enabling them to minimize their contribution to harmful distortions caused by misinformation or asymmetrical control of information by the dominant interest groups.

Deliberate miscommunication can take so many forms in a public meeting, but the webinar did not offer concrete ways to manage this type of quieter disruptions. Understating the damage of manipulative tactics could inadvertently lead to demonizing emotional responses to such manipulation by affected persons. There are situations where outrage is warranted, but if planners’ role is only to keep the meeting going according to the agenda, it’s no wonder that many have lost faith in the ability of planners to catalyze positive reforms. Of course, I’m speaking as a fellow critical theorist and not as a practicing planner.

Basically, scholars have come to challenge the notion that government planning functions are formal and legitimate while disruptive grassroot efforts are informal and even criminal. They argue that this bifurcated construct has been used to obfuscate the extent to which the former has frequently broken the rules and did things informally to accomplish their objectives and advance their interests. This observation led to clearer views of (public sector) planning’s limitations in advancing progressive goals. According to F. Miraftab (2004), planners may “invite” participation into controlled spaces where things more or less operated on their terms, but this resistance to losing control is a major deterrent to transfer of power to marginalized or unorganized groups. On the other hand, armed with sufficient information, the grassroots, instead of participating in these invited spaces, could “invent” their own spaces where they have some control over the narratives, and where dominant interests have greater difficulty reaching and exerting their agendas.

In the context of community development planning which requires the combined efforts of many different actors all with different priorities and levels of formal and de facto authority (see Reece et al., 2023 and the papers it discussed), the formal-informal interface becomes like quantum foam--increasingly difficult to map and predict. But if we want to see positive changes, we have to embrace letting go of the safe and known, be realistic about the inadequacies of our planning systems, and make room for transformative disruptions.