The Center of Urban and Regional Planning for Postgraduate Studies at the University of Baghdad organized a training course entitled “The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Urban and Regional Planning: Cautions and Warnings.” The course was presented by Dr. Abdul Wahab Ahmed Jameel, a faculty member at the center, and was attended by a group of faculty members, staff, and postgraduate students.
The course aimed to highlight the role of artificial intelligence in urban and regional planning and its immense potential for managing and planning cities. It also addressed how artificial intelligence can improve the efficiency and performance of urban systems and its ability to process and analyze massive amounts of multimedia data. This, in turn, helps urban planners and policymakers make more effective decisions. During the two-day course, Dr. Jameel covered several key topics, including the most important caveats and warnings that urban planners should consider in the planning process to achieve optimal results, avoid complete reliance on artificial intelligence, and prevent issues that could weaken the planning process.
The most important conclusions reached by the course focused on the algorithmic bias of data fed into artificial intelligence systems. This bias stems from the perspectives of service providers, resulting in outputs that are inconsistent with varying circumstances and favor the initial input. Each society has its own characteristics and culture that shape its behavior, which in turn informs most urban planning decisions. Furthermore, ethical considerations are often disregarded in decision-making regarding available data. This can lead to bias towards one region at the expense of another, or towards one segment of society by favoring certain behaviors over others. This, in turn, affects general behavior, lifestyles, and the overall structure of the city, thus deepening inequality.
Dr. Jamil came out with a number of recommendations based on the need to avoid strengthening the dominance of providers of these services by feeding them data in huge quantities, which contributes greatly to their development in their favor, which strengthens their control in a way that serves their personal interests and taking into account errors and lack of accuracy, as they respond in all circumstances, even if they rely on the poverty of data, as well as reducing human creativity that is sometimes imposed by artificial intelligence that keeps pace with current events by taking ethical measures before being planning, such as creativity in planning according to categories or what happens in emergency situations.
