Finding a common language – beyond technical jargon – is essential to enable citizen science. Visualisation can be particularly useful in this context when it comes to creating scenarios in urban spaces or at the neighbourhood level.
With the help of artificial intelligence, scenarios can be created in near real-time by laypersons, which can form the basis for further discussions and development. UrbanistAI is a tool that has been tested in workshops held by the TalTech OPUSH team in collaboration with the ministry and the Kalamaja Museum.
What should be the tools and instruments that help people to express their wishes in a way that professional spatial experts can understand, and vice versa?
A potential solution for the different actors to find a common language can be the visualisation of urban space using artificial intelligence (AI). UrbanistAI (https://site.urbanistai.com/) provides both a methodology for conducting workshops and AI-based visual tools for urban planning, enabling residents, architects, urban planners, developers and local government representatives to create and analyse new visual spaces. The tool uses AI-based technology to create different potential urban design scenarios using photos of the existing urban space under discussion and a verbal description of how they would like to see certain areas of the urban space, suggested by the participants (so called “prompts”).
At the end of September 2023, as part of the ‘Design Night’ festival in Tallinn, citizens had the opportunity to participate in a workshop on ‘Street Design with AI’ and test the UrbanistAI tool for co-creating urban spaces.
The sample area on which the participants could practice their visions was chosen as Niine Street, a short street in the city centre of Tallinn. It is one of the important links connecting the Kalamaja district with the Old Town. The location of the workshop was chosen to be a local community museum – the Kalamaja Museum.
The workshop participants worked in three different groups and the workshop lasted for almost three hours. During this time, more than a thousand images were created. For each idea found its way into a picture, and then the participants could further develop their shared vision.
To get an idea of the participants' expectations of the urban space they were creating, everyone was asked to write down keywords that they would use to describe their visions streetscapes in the area. Each participant brought their own individual wishes, perspectives, knowledge and experiences to the workshop. In the subsequent group work, they started to look for a common vision for the streets in the Kalamaja district in general and then moved on to the context of a specific street. In the working groups, a varying number of images were created, from which the participants selected the ones they felt were the most interesting or promising. For each vision, the group began by examining what was incorrect about the image and tried to come up with keywords to prompt the AI in order to find a solution that seemed more correct, until they concluded that it was reasonably accurate or valuable.
For example, the workshop participants did a lot of visioning and discussing about urban gardening. However, the solutions proposed by AI were all options that required a significant amount of maintenance. The group was more interested in a solution that would enhance the landscape without requiring constant care. Eventually, wild and easy-care greenery seemed to best suit the shared vision.
In one of the citizen scientist groups, the redesign of Niine Street began with a discussion about the identity of the street itself. In the end, the group came to the common conclusion that the street is something in between a place and a street. Currently, however, it is not really a place where people like to stop and linger. Nevertheless, the street used as a demo area during the workshop clearly had the potential to become such a place one day. The workshop participants thought that Niine Street could use more space for pedestrians and that the street space should be divided between the different types of traffic more safely, while also adding landscaping. During the three-hour workshop, there was no clear vision of what Niine Street might actually look like in the future. The participants of this group were fairly frustrated that they could not get it right during the workshop. However, the main ideas and keywords that the participants were using to search for a street space clearly emerged.
Workshop results and conclusions
The participants were surprised at how well the groups collaborated. Several participants pointed out that it was much easier to explain their ideas using images than in words. It was also surprising that a shared vision emerged despite the fact that the participants had not met before.
One of the outcomes of the workshop can therefore be seen as confirmation that the serious game approach to an AI-based tool can indeed – depending on how it is used – become something that brings people together and creates collaborative visions. These co-created visions can serve as enablers for creating a better space.
The concluding discussion of the workshop revealed that both the citizen scientists and the architects had the impression that this co-creation process worked smoothly and that the collaboration went well. However, it turned out that the AI-based tool is less suitable for detailed design, but is more useful for developing overall ideas and more abstract scenarios including aesthetic-emotional components for the street space.
Spatial design tools based on artificial intelligence should not be understood as solutions, but rather as tools that can support in creating visions and scenarios to rethink urban space and its potential.
The UrbanistAI tool assisted in better connecting the local community and citizen scientists in the search for a shared vision. UrbanistAI is first and foremost a co-creation tool that aids in clarifying ideas, raising questions that might otherwise not have been asked, and arriving at ideas that would have required testing the unrealistic.
Watch the workshop video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLaL8j9vl70
The workshop was organised by the Academy of Architecture and Urban Studies at Tallinn University of Technology as part of the JPI Urban project OPUSH. The workshop was supported by the Estonian Ministry of Climate Change, the government of North Tallinn and the Kalamaja Museum.
Fabian Dembski, Lill Sarv and Laugren Ilves