Abstract Summary
The city is a complex socio-technical system, where stakeholders with very different needs and values live together. Usually, when developing urban interventions, policymakers consider as stakeholders citizens grouped by different characteristics such as income, cultural background, or age, depending on the specific case. We argue this is a limited definition, as our cities are also ecosystems inhabited by a wide array of (non-human) species. In particular, in the context of developing climate resilient cities, it is crucial to consider the environment itself a stakeholder when developing urban policies. Here, the anthropocentrism typical of human-centered design methodologies is a limiting factor, as it allows to tailor the designed solutions only around people's benefits, ignoring the context (e.g., the environment) and the long-term effects. While everyone agrees it is important to consider the long-term effect on the ecosystem, it is difficult for people to really imagine the consequences for the environment. Bringing together arts and AI, we propose a novel approach to reinventing the city that moves beyond our current generations to include future generations and non-human perspectives; we want to explore how AI can complement creative storytelling and role-playing methods to expand the boundaries of human-centered methods. In particular, we want to explore how new technologies can make the creative experience more tangible (e.g., by means of virtual and augmented reality); how they can allow to reach a wider and more diverse set of perspectives; and, how they can be used to create a responsive environment that allows for more complex creative processes, not possible within traditional methods.
