What happens when communities take collective responsibility for governing urban spaces—and what role could generative AI play in this process?
Re-permissioning the City (PtC), a project by Dark Matter Labs piloted in Daegu, South Korea, and explored in Amsterdam as part of a parallel experiment, envisions a community-led system for governing and negotiating urban spaces. Through an open permissions architecture, PtC seeks to redistribute power, unlocking underutilized spaces for diverse civic uses while fostering collective stewardship and active participation. This approach addresses critical gaps in urban governance, where rigid, centralized systems often leave spaces underutilized, missing opportunities for economic and social revitalization.
However, redistributing power also means redistributing liability. Urban governance can demand hours of negotiation as diverse perspectives and shared responsibilities increase complexity. Beyond logistical challenges, participatory governance can introduce tensions, as personal, social, or political views come into play, potentially creating friction in communities.
Could generative AI address these challenges? AI might synthesize perspectives, mediate opposing views, and streamline negotiations, alleviating the time burden of consensus-building. Yet, this raises pressing questions: What happens if AI misinterprets priorities or exhibits bias? Could it erode the human capacity for empathy and compromise, making it easier to reject proposals? How do human dynamics differ from those facilitated by AI?
Workshop
In this 3-hour interactive workshop, participants will explore the complexities of participatory governance, using generative AI as a tool to support decision-making processes. Through role-playing, AI experimentation, and reflective discussions, attendees will examine how urban rule-making could evolve in a hybrid human-AI system.
Participants will:
- Step into stakeholder roles such as property owners, event organizers, or even parking spaces to identify contextual values and speculatively craft governance rules for a vacant property.
- Engage with generative AI to reinterpret these rules, simulating negotiations with AI-represented stakeholders.
- Negotiate in person with other stakeholder groups, comparing the dynamics of human-driven discussions to those mediated by AI.
The session will culminate in a reflective discussion: Did AI fairly represent diverse perspectives? What biases emerged? How did human dynamics—compromise, conflict, or empathy—compare to AI-facilitated negotiations?
This workshop invites urban planners, technologists, policymakers, and curious thinkers to reimagine how communities and AI can collaboratively shape the governance of urban spaces. Whether you’re an expert or exploring these ideas for the first time, join us to reimagine how communities and AI might co-shape the future of urban spaces!
About the Host
Zeynep Uğur is a transition designer who applies living systems theory and place-based approaches to address complex societal challenges. As a strategic designer at Fairspace, she leads co-creative projects to make public spaces safer for all. At Disrupt Development, she challenges dominant power structures in international development by providing expertise in creative impact measurement, situated research, and innovative methodologies. Zeynep also delivers workshops and lectures on topics at the intersection of politics, speculative futures, design, and the pluriverse.
With a focus on social sustainability, participatory methodologies, and decentralized alternatives, Zeynep bridges design, social innovation, and technology in her collaborations with NGOs, educational institutions, and government-funded initiatives.
Always grounding her work in social theories, Zeynep is currently co-developing a framework that integrates the critical, in-depth research cycles of social sciences with the interventionist and experimental approaches of design. This initiative, Cross-Pollination: Designing with and Through Social Sciences, aims to foster interdisciplinary collaborations that produce impactful, actionable solutions.
Recently, Zeynep has been exploring the potential of data as a design material to shape radically better futures through the lenses of critical data studies and value-sensitive design. As a creative technologist, she experiments with data to imagine and enable alternative worlds, pushing the boundaries of what design can achieve in addressing complex societal challenges.