Digital planning and working with AI: On the construction of places

Subproject B01 contributes to the key area “Spaces of Digital Mediatization” of the DFG Collaborative Research Centre 1265 ‘Re-Figuration of Spaces’, which is coordinated at Technische Universität Berlin. It investigates the refiguration of spaces in the context of digital planning strategies in urban and rural areas, with a particular focus on the role of artificial intelligence.

At the center of the third funding phase lies the systematic analysis of the spatial figure of place and the question of how AI-supported planning processes shape and transform place identities. The study foregrounds the spatialities of artificial intelligence, understood as the interplay between algorithmic procedures, planning practices, and social negotiation processes. Case studies in urban contexts such as New York and Lagos, as well as in rural regions of Chile, combine qualitative methods, including expert interviews and ethnographic observations, with secondary analyses from previous project phases and other subprojects.

While the first and second funding phases established the foundations by examining urban and rural spaces amid digital transformation and revealing tensions in the construction of place identities, the third phase aims for a deeper theoretical and empirical understanding of the role of artificial intelligence as well as for a systematization of the construction of place identities within processes of spatial refiguration.