AI-Based Tools to Enhance Visioning and Urban Decision Making in Future Deliberative Processes Within the Web-Platform Decidim

This contribution takes into consideration the possible integration of AI-based tools for the production of images within bottom-up decision-making processes, focusing urban planning when this involves the use of web platforms – for deliberative processes – like Decidim. Using Decidm, the only platform with open-source code useful for deliberative processes, and integrating in the use of the web platform a tool for the generation of images/ project vision based on Artificial Intelligence, this paper examines possible future scenarios in which AI-based tools play a role in deliberative processes in participatory urban planning. The contribution compares three of the main competitors among the different tools for generating images based on diffusion models, capable of processing and/or modifying images by predicting the position of individual pixels, to select the more suitable one to be integrated in a participatory process. Finally, by sytemising the Decidim platform and the AI-based Stable diffusion tools, the contribution exposes three possible integration scenarios taking into consideration in which steps of the “participation ladder” the participatory process would be positioned.