The Image of the City through Digital Participatory Platform: A comparative study of “AI-mediated” and “non-mediated” discussions in five major cities of Afghanistan

Abstract

In “The Image of the City” by Kevin Lynch describes how individuals perceive and recall features in urban spaces and represent a city by sharing their opinions. However, due to constraints such as time and space, the traditional forms of public participation to describe and shape citizens' mental representation of the city are untenable. Therefore, Lynch’s approach has stimulated research into digital participatory technologies, mainly artificial intelligence to study the perception and analysis of urban dynamics. In this paper, we propose to study this phenomenon using a digital participatory platform with a combination of “AI-mediated” and “non-mediated” support involving a large number of citizens using open call in five major cities of Afghanistan. The aims were to (1) examine whether AI can elicit city image through extracting and visualizing the insights of citizens in real-time, and (2) evaluate how AI-mediated discussion can elicit innovative elements of city image in comparison to non-mediated discussion. The results show that AI-mediated discussion improved the responsiveness of the participants and increased the number of identified ideas compared to non-mediated discussion.