By: Steven Cornwell, Global Director & CEO — ERA-co

Due to growing challenges around global resources, expanding cities, and climate change, community planning is at a crossroads. In the history of planning, we’ve never had so much information at our fingertips, yet we planners continually make suboptimal decisions while designing environments.

Artificial intelligence (AI) processes offer a powerful way to disentangle the complexity of communities in a refined, efficient way, allowing us to make better decisions that impact our urban and rural communities. Nevertheless, it is important for planners to implement these technologies in an ethical and responsible manner, with consideration given to issues such as privacy, bias, and inclusivity. 

How AI Can Assist Community Planning

AI can assist the community-planning process in many ways, starting with the gathering of many different kinds of data. Overall, data describing both the social and physical world are vital for understanding the way a place functions. For instance, to follow how people move through a space, we may use road network data, cell phone data, or video surveys to track pedestrian walking patterns. Urban-block-size data can tell us how easy or hard it is to move around, while “Points of Interest” information can shed light on footfall and patterns of land use.

Toward that end, AI may collect static data from free or paid sources or dynamic data sets. These are the building blocks from which we can start asking more complex questions. AI may also store these vast amounts of data automatically, thereby enabling these numbers to be organized in ways that generate key insights.

More importantly, AI can identify patterns and create visualizations of the data to help inform decision-making. Once planning bodies and environmental conditions set the site constraints and stakeholders — such as members of the community and investors — define their aspirations for the space, these parameters may be digitally reflected in the data and coded into the AI. The program can then generate various design options based on those criteria, heavily mitigating the time spent redrawing design iterations and analyzing options manually.

Since AI operates quickly and tirelessly, it may complete any of these steps more efficiently than a human being, thereby alleviating the need to do tedious and time-consuming tasks. In my experience, these activities are sometimes pushed to the side in order to meet deadlines, despite their importance to fulfilling project goals. The incorporation of AI can ensure a more thorough process while freeing up stakeholders to focus on strategic outcomes. This is one of the main benefits of allowing AI to do the work.

Yet, even this isn’t the highest use to which AI may be put. The incorporation of AI technology into community planning could have a radical impact on how planning decisions are made.

A Revolution in Decision Making

The design process currently repeats a series of defined steps in order to produce many iterations until the end solution finally emerges. Conversely, AI processes can work in reverse; by placing the various constraints and desired outcomes into its computations, an AI framework could generate iterations that help stakeholders reach a solution faster and in a rigorous way.

In addition, AI may help change the idea that communities should design or build something a certain way just because that’s how it has been done in the past. To move toward a desired outcome, placemaking practitioners (i.e., designers and planners) generally want to simplify complex situations. While experience, precedence, and intuition do have a role to play, these factors may also set the design path along a well-trodden road of previous projects. When this happens, unchecked biases can enter the process, leading to disadvantageous decisions that repeat previous errors. AI processes can mitigate this problem by incorporating a wide array of inputs into calculations. 

Finally, AI can bring greater objectivity into the placemaking process. For instance, decision-makers in democracies tend to think on a short-term time scale. Conversely, AI can take a long-term view and identify the most advantageous planning decisions overall, informed by the entire scope of human history as well as a dispassionate perspective.

Addressing Pitfalls of AI Assistance

Regardless of the type of tasks planners entrust AI to take on, however, machines will always require some level of human involvement and supervision. Before an AI framework is established, the quality of the data is paramount. The old data adage of “garbage in, garbage out” is even more true today than when it was first coined. Data quality and cleaning processes are key to ensuring that various calculations and subsequent findings start from a solid foundation.

Another possible pitfall is the scale of the consideration. Some AI platforms reduce complexity when analyzing communities by only considering the area within the site in question and not the surrounding context — but context is everything in placemaking. Planners need to be aware of this limitation, considering how large both the site and the study area should really be in order to gain the best insights for the location in question.

Finally, AI may be subject to ethical and legal concerns, posing risks to data privacy and security. Malicious actors may attempt to exploit it for harmful purposes, and planners must guard against algorithmic biases. In addition, the AI’s logic may be difficult to explain or interpret, making it challenging to understand how it arrived at its decisions. Since AI isn’t conscious and doesn’t think as humans do, it can demonstrate poor judgment and fail to understand societal values like public value or the common good. 

To avoid such pitfalls, the insights gained through the help of AI, as well as its decision-making processes, must be evaluated continuously to ensure proper outcomes. AI’s limitations should be recognized in any planning process and balanced with human intelligence. Data findings should be workshopped with community stakeholders and translated into actionable insights that lead to a finalized plan.

AI Enables More Informed, Engaged Stakeholders

The placemaking process involves many stakeholders who often have different requirements and aspirations for the site. Across the early stages of planning work, planners must therefore navigate pressures from these competing constituencies. Creating the framework to set out commonly held goals and objectives can be a challenging process.

With the help of AI, complex and nebulous data points can be quickly and efficiently organized to identify unifying elements that help drive the planning process. With AI processes, people will not be taken out of the equation. Conversely, they will be involved more than ever, since their participation will become better informed.

— Steven Cornwell is the Global Director of ERA-co, a place consultancy that specializes in place intelligence, experience masterplanning, placemaking & activation, and brand & communication. He has over 20 years of experience leading brands and city building from a broad range of sectors, including real estate, place, transportation, and infrastructure.

Published by: Holy Minoza