Using Decision Support System to Enable Crowd Identify Neighborhood Issues and Its Solutions for Policy Makers: An Online Experiment at Kabul Municipal Level

Abstract

Planning a city is a systematic process that includes time, space, and groups of people who must communicate. However, due to security problems in such war-ravaged countries as Afghanistan, the traditional forms of public participation in the planning process are untenable. In particular, due to gathering space difficulties and culture issues in Afghanistan, women and religious minorities are restricted from joining male-dominated powerholders’ face-to-face meetings which are nearly always held in fixed places called masjids (religious buildings). Furthermore, conducting such discussions with human facilitation biases the generation of citizen decisions that stimulates an atmosphere of confrontation, causing another decision problem for urban policy-making institutions. Therefore, it is critical to find approaches that not only securely revolutionize participative processes but also provide meaningful and equal public consultation to support interactions among stakeholders to solve their shared problems together. Toward this end, we propose a joint research program, namely, crowd-based communicative and deliberative e-planning (CCDP), a blended approach, which is a mixture of using an artificial-intelligence-led technology, decision-support system called D-Agree and experimental participatory planning in Kabul, Afghanistan. For the sake of real-world implementation, Nagoya Institute of Technology (Japan) and Kabul Municipality (Afghanistan) have formed a novel developed and developing world partnership by using our proposed methodology as an emerging-deliberation mechanism to reframe public participation in urban planning processes. In the proposed program, Kabul municipality agreed to use our methodology when Kabul city needs to make a plan with people. This digital field study presents the first practical example of using online decision support systems in the context of the neighborhood functions of Gozars, which are Kabul’s social and spatial urban units. The main objective was to harness the wisdom of the crowd to innovative suggestions for helping policymakers making strategic development plans for Gozars using open call ideas, and for responding to equal participation and consultation needs, specifically for women and minorities. This article presents valuable insights into the benefits of this combined approach as blended experience for societies and cities that are suffering long-term distress. This initiative has influenced other local Afghan governments, including the cities of Kandahar and Herat as well as the country’s central government’s ministry of urban planning and land, which has officially expressed its intention to collaborate with us.

Impact of AI-Based Tools and Urban Big Data Analytics on the Design and Planning of Cities

“…Collaboratively Sensing the City-User-generated content, especially volunteered geographic information, is becoming an important source of information for urban participatory practice to gather information, generate ideas, and even generate solutions to the diagnosed problems [62,68]; • Empirical Urban Research-use of big data and AI allows for widening the scope of possible analyses to find a way to measure, and as result make an evidence-based decision, such phenomena as spatial quality and urban image [55,65]. It helps to effectively combine quantitative studies with a qualitative approach, and even to quantify behaviours, sentiments, or happiness [97].…”

Conversational agents enhance women's contribution in online debates

“…The safety challenges at the time of the study further hindered our ability to target a bigger population. The study could, however, be expanded with a more representative demographic by implementing strategies that we have previously envisioned and tested in “hybrid” experiments conducted in Afghanistan 43 and Japan 25 . We propose three several solutions to address the limitations.…”

“…The causes, factors, and outcomes were addressed in various studies using conventional tools and ICTs 42 . Governments have adapted ICT4D into their policies to empower citizens 43 . Researchers have also conducted feminist science and technology studies to propose ways to empower women's social presence using ICT4D 44 , 45 .…”

Towards Hypedermocracy: Case Studies on an Agent-powered Online Discussion Support Systems

“…In particular, D-Agree has been well received by the international community. In Afghanistan, it is culturally difficult for women to participate in politics, but the fact that they can participate in online discussions has also attracted attention [5,6,11,12]. In Afghanistan, some people said that they trusted the facilitation by an AI agent because they could not know the political beliefs of a human facilitator.…”

“…The UN published a report on the results of the survey. These were reported in a report published by the United Nations, and have attracted attention from the perspective of humanitarian assistance [5,6,11,14].…”