If this is a planner: Artificial intelligence’s way towards scenario building

Abstract

In spatial planning and decision-making, communities search for effective approaches and methodologies to organize future strategies. The future workshop approach is a scenario building process involving expert and non‑expert agents to create strategies toward achieving future alternatives. Our group has developed much research and experimentation using this approach, in real communities and simulated situations. This paper reports an experiment investigating the potential usefulness of the involving artificial intelligence agents in future workshop approaches. By interacting with a search engine equipped with ChatGPT by OpenAI, the simulation of scenarios for a master plan of Bari is carried out. The interaction basically develops as a structured interview, in which the AI provides information and suggestions to build up future scenarios.