Beyond the Townhall
Carina I Hausladen, Javier Argota Sánchez-Vaquerizo, Michael Siebenmann, Arthur Capozzi, Sachit Mahajan, Dirk Helbing
Spatial Anchoring and LLM Agents for
Participatory Urban Planning
Participatory Urban Planning
- Climate change is one of the defining challenges of our time.
- Sustainable urban planning plays a key role in addressing it.
- Technical innovation alone is not sufficient for lasting urban transformation.
- Effective solutions require meaningful public participation and collective ownership.
How to improve participation in Sustainable Urban Planning?
How to make the process truly inclusive?
Participatory Urban Planning
How to improve participation in Sustainable Urban Planning?
How to make the process truly inclusive?
at scale
Participatory Urban Planning
ion
Information
Information
- Participation cannot be meaningful without understanding
- Well-designed briefing materials have been shown to reduce polarization and enable reflective judgment (Fishkin 2018)
- Information must be engaging, and memorable.
engaging
memorable
Information
engaging
memorable
Immersion
- VR and AR reshape what citizens notice and how they deliberate
- Immersive formats consistently improve comprehension of spatial consequences and often shift the substance of public debate
- Perspective-taking
- Citizens rarely hold multiple interpretive frames simultaneously;
- they tend to approach proposals through a single habitual lens and thus
- require support for re-imagining the issue from alternative viewpoints.
How can we keep the immersive parts of VR but make it scalable?
Information
engaging
memorable
Recall
- Meaningful democratic participation requires that citizens recall information to deliberate and vote.
- The design of information material must align with the
cognitive mechanisms of memory
How can we improve the recall of information?
Information
engaging
memorable
Participation
How to integrate information and participation?
Sustainable Urban Planning
1.
4.
Memorable Information
2.
Scalable Participation
3.
Sustainable Urban Planning
1.
Sustainable Urban Planning
1.
Memorable Information
2.
Spatial anchoring
Pointing at
objects in VR
Dual coding
First person video +
360° audio
Event Segmentation
Sustainable Urban Planning
1.
Memorable Information
2.
Scalable Participation
3.
- RAG-grounded information provision
- Facilitate reflective dialogue
Sustainable Urban Planning
1.
Memorable Information
2.
Scalable Participation
3.
Sustainable Urban Planning
1.
Memorable Information
2.
Scalable Participation
3.
Results
Results
n = 195
- Treatment participants wrote longer answers,
- used more of the original vocabulary and
- were significantly more likely to retain numbers.
The walkthrough group remembered more
This may sound unsurprising.
Pictures and videos are more vivid than text.
The surprise lay in what the additional retention was used for.
Conversations changed
Treatment
Control
Conversations changed
Treatment
Control
"Fruit trees can turn the area into a meeting place… for strangers to share a fruit."
"Family events… bringing together all of the different generations."
"Brotherhood and unity among residents."
"You aren't going to be able to bring tons of fresh, cooled produce on the back of a bike."
"A big cash pay-out may give me some compensation", or simply,
"a parking space near my home."
LLMs received positive ratings
- "I found them very useful and understanding, no improvement is needed."
- "Gustavo was continually trying to engage, which could be a bit annoying"
- "They both suffered from a sycophantic nature..."
- "I think they were neutral and didn't sway me in either direction.
- "It is aimed at always favoring the project and never really talking about the issues."
Treatment
"Are the newly planted trees well-rooted? Urban trees often fail because their roots don't take."
"Will there be services for leaf pickup and gardening?"
Control
"installation of sun sails", "luxuries like swimming pools".
"removal of parking spaces will destroy local business"; "a 15-min city does not work".
Consultation quality changed
Recall changes the quality of citizens' feedback. "compensate me for the parking" -->
"have you thought about leaf pickup".
- Voting patterns did not change
- Entrenched positions: Five participants remained immovably hostile.
- conversational AI is not a substitute for face-to-face deliberation in entrenched cases.
Limitations
- Contextual understanding strengthens democratic deliberation on sustainability projects.
- Design recommendations for civic LLM systems.
- Addressing negativity bias in online sustainability discourse.
- Democratic sustainability communication.
Discussion
carina.hausladen@uni-konstanz.de
Appendix
- Real-world comparison based on an urban planning project in Lausanne:
- 47 online comments from 36 users
- Sentiment classification: multilingual
-
cardiffnlp/twitter-xlm-roberta-base-sentiment model
-
- Online comments: 50.7% negative | 28.4% positive | 20.9% neutral
- LLM interactions : 10.3% negative | 37.0% positive | 52.6% neutral
Comparison to real online discussion
From Self-Interest to Collective Reasoning
Prosocial Urban Planning
Carina I Hausladen
Effects of Immersive Information on
Information
engaging
memorable
Participation
How to integrate information and participation?