Artificial Intelligence & Planning Practice

It is really hard to be comprehensive and approachable on complex and multidisciplinary topics such as Artificial Intelligence (AI). My coauthor Dr. Michael Flaxman and I tried to equip planners with an understanding of AI concepts and their potential uses for practice in Planning Advisory Service Memo 111. And because planners have a responsibility to understand the implications of the technologies they choose to deploy and help to ensure that those technologies are used responsibly, it discusses important considerations regarding AI applications and their roles in larger trends connected to digital governance and civic data in planning.

I personally was motivated to complete this article because there are key areas where I feel AI and related technologies can augment practice to address key contemporary challenges such as community affordability, safe systems, digital governance, and adapting human settlements to the climate crisis. Some of the most inspiring examples to me mentioned in this vein include American Forests use of high-resolution tree canopy data to build Tree Equity Score. At the same time, I was motivated to highlight what other researchers have identified as potential risks such as cementing historical analytical frames, exacerbating inequality, and enabling delusions of certainty.

If you are interested, my website's publications page for the article is below, but you can find the Memo at APA’s Website here. If you are not an APA member, you can just reach out to me.

Acknowledgements

This has been something in the works for the for the past 6 months, with many people I am grateful to for influencing and enabling this publication.

• We were very lucky to have a robust network of peer reviewers including Norman Wright, Keith Cooke, Thomas Sanchez, Ben Lytle, Tyler Scott, Chelsea Leu, Brett Hondorp, Jean Crowther, Hannah Day-Kapell, Jason Reyes, and Petra Hurtado. We would be remiss if we did not call out the excellent layout and edits by APA Editors such as Ann Dillemuth.
• The organizations that were a source of ideas or topics for the memo include the APA's Foresight Committee on AI, ITE's Data Committee, and multiple OECD/ITF publications exploring trends in digital governance and preparedness.
• The litany of authors of both peer-reviewed literature and books up to the year of publication of this article provided a strong foundation. I am simply amazed at the number of professionals and academics trying make sense of and the implications of these technologies. To those authors, there are many things I wish we could have pulled from your papers. Whether it was the humanist framing of Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI, the nuance of the perils of prediction itself from Sandra Mayson's Bias In and Bias Out, or the comprehensive review urban informatics and civic analytics in planning education of Constantine Kontokosta. We tried.
• Data vendors and software providers across the spectrum provided images and required release forms for this publication. This include companies I had to cold call corporate numbers and partners I have worked with previously. These include Numina, Ecopia, Mapillary, Transoft Solutions, Esri, UrbanSim, NVIDIA, BangTheTable, Automotus, and EarthDefine.