A Ladder of Citizen Participation with Artificial Intelligence

Keywords: artificial intelligence, engagement, participation, urban planning, urban geography, city
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Technologies like geographic information system have become integral to how urban planners and geographers engage the public. Increasingly they are exploring the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in fostering participation, for example by parsing social media with unsupervised classification algorithms to understand public sentiment or by using chatbots to elicit public input. Policy makers are examining how the public might participate in AI policies (e.g., https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2022/02/28/144-toronto-police-officers-signed-up-to-use-clearview-ai-mass-surveillance-tech.html). Further, researchers and others are interested in how AI and software platforms shape the city and its residents, for example creating a digital growth machine (Rosen and Alvarez Leon, 2022). AI will play a role in civic participation even as it shifts ideas about what constitutes the public, participation and the city.

I will talk about the role of AI in public participation against the background of the shifting city. My talk builds on the most influential article in urban planning, Sherry Arnstein's 1969 article, "A ladder of citizen participation". Although it has been critiqued and amended, Arnstein's model remains a durable model of stages of participation (e.g., in smart cities, cf. Cardullo and Kitchin 2019). I will present a model of how a participatory AI ladder plays out, rung by rung, modifying and extending the original rungs. I hope the Participatory AI ladder generates a lively discussion on the role of AI in the city as it is used to engage (or perhaps dissuade, pacify or control) its residents.