This analysis draws on ethnographic research in a Northern UK city where a series of engagement activities produced hand-drawn sketches about the future. This paper shows how different groups revealed contradictory aspirations for the area with growth-focused politicians and planners projecting affluent prosperity rather than the modest, family-oriented social stability sought by local people.
Reconciling multiple perspectives is the greatest challenge of civic leadership. This paper considers how the emerging potential of artificial intelligence (AI) could support a structured imagining process for masterplanners to aggregate aspirational sketches at scale and so develop a closer relationship between citizen ideas for the future and civic decision makers’ own strategies and action plans.
This paper argues for a collective intelligence paradigm that aggregates individual futures thinking at city scale. Urban masterplanning strategies provide an organising structure to allow a city to emerge as a flourishing of multiple aspirations all at once.
Rather than having individualism or collectivism as binary alternatives, generative AI offers an intriguing process for combining individual aspirations into a pluralist endeavour.
Engaging with citizens on the ground, in their homes and community spaces is the only way to uncover what is important to them. Ethnography provides that.
Although AI’s use of aggregated data is collective, intelligence comes from nuanced and ethnographic engagement with the data.
The principle of the emergent city (Symons 2017) provides a conceptual approach to amalgamating the individual with the collective.
