Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences最新文献

This study examines legitimacy in municipal budgeting decisions, focusing on input, throughput and output dimensions. Using data from four Swiss studies, we explore how citizens assess these dimensions across traditional and innovative decision-making processes and investigate the impact of different voting methods on legitimacy perceptions. Our findings reveal that in routine processes using traditional voting, legitimacy dimensions are considered collectively. Conversely, in innovative participatory budgeting, dimensions are judged separately, involving more active evaluation. Throughput legitimacy (perceived fairness) emerges as crucial in both contexts, while input and output legitimacy's importance varies by process type. The Method of Equal Shares voting system shifts focus towards procedural fairness, increases representation and is perceived as fairer than the traditional Greedy method. However, even fair processes cannot fully compensate for outcome dissatisfaction, highlighting the complex interplay of legitimacy dimensions. This research contributes to understanding legitimacy construction in municipal decision-making, offering insights into the relationship between voting methods and legitimacy perceptions. The findings have implications for policy-makers seeking to enhance the effectiveness and acceptance of budgeting processes. This article is part of the theme issue 'Co-creating the future: participatory cities and digital governance'.

We focus here on methods for locating future urban development, ranging from entire towns to site designs. These methods articulate the urban design problem in terms of a series of factors pertaining to different measures of land suitability that are represented as spatial surfaces or maps. In realistic problems, these factors inevitably conflict with one another, and we thus define various design methods that enable us to select optimal locations for development based on weighting these factors in different ways. We begin with methods for resolving conflicts between the suitability maps using simple averaging with equal weights and then introduce methods for representing the interactions between the factors as a hierarchy for how these factors can be related to each other following an order for their differential weighting. We then generalize this method to ways in which a variety of individual experts can pool their knowledge of the problem to achieve a consensus solution using a process of group dynamics. The implication is that these kinds of dynamics might be used to enable effective public participation where conflicts between opinions can be resolved collectively. We are currently exploring this through methods of geodesign where networks of stakeholders, planners and designers can be brought together to solve these problems both empirically as well as formally.This article is part of the theme issue 'Co-creating the future: participatory cities and digital governance'.

Historically, urban congestion and street life quality depended on city network hierarchies, shaped by land use and street layout. Yet navigation apps have shifted focus to travel time as the key route selection factor, challenging traditional urban structures. We review the development of an innovative approach to urban traffic management that leverages real-time data for the identification and analysis of traffic bottlenecks. This approach, combined with urban planning, aims to improve traffic flow and tackle modern urban challenges. It includes real-time bottleneck detection and cost, congestion analysis and designing a decentralized traffic management system that can serve planners. Based on complex system principles, it promises dynamic traffic optimization, merging urban planning with digital advancements. The research demonstrates the potential of different applications of the proposed methodologies to predict significant congestion from early bottleneck formation, offering urban planners a powerful toolset for reasserting their role in shaping the urban experience. This article posits that a nuanced understanding of traffic dynamics, coupled with advanced traffic management technologies, can restore the influence of urban planning in the digital era, fostering more liveable, equitable and efficient urban environments. This article is part of the theme issue 'Co-creating the future: participatory cities and digital governance'.

Technological artefacts are created in accordance with the values and worldviews of their designers. In operation, they act as a medium, facilitating and constraining human interaction with, and perception of, the world. When used on a large scale, they may lastingly affect societal ethos. If institutional structures of domination allocate the resources necessary for artefact design and development to some population groups over others, the direction and extent of such an effect may lead to increased disparity and inequity. While the direct influence of technology on opinion is well-studied, the evaluation of non-epistemic values, assumptions and presuppositions is a hurdle in the way of a deeper understanding of the large-scale effects of asymmetries in worldviews embodied by artefacts. Here, we show that artefacts have a strong potential to bias societal worldviews when they are distributed unevenly across the value spectrum. They can affect the clustering behaviour of agents with regard to worldview, both aiding and hindering intra- and inter-cluster diversity, depending on their distribution and frequency. Our findings underline the distributional sensitivity of worldview dynamics to institutional structures of domination. We highlight the importance of procedural interventions such as participatory design, which explicitly acknowledges existing asymmetries and redistributes power accordingly.This article is part of the theme issue 'Co-creating the future: participatory cities and digital governance'.

The concept of 'proximity-based cities' has gained attention as a new urban organizational model. Most prominently, the 15-minute city contends that cities can function more effectively, equitably and sustainably if essential, everyday services and key amenities are within a 15-minute walk or cycle. However, focusing solely on travel time risks overlooking disparities in service quality, as the proximity paradigm tends to emphasize the mere presence of an element in a location rather than bringing up more complex questions of identity, diversity, quality, value or relationships. Transitioning to value-based cities by considering more than just proximity can enhance local identity, resilience and urban democracy. Fostering bottom-up initiatives can create a culture of local care and value, while predominantly top-down governing strategies can lead to large inequalities. Balancing these approaches can maximize resilience, health and sustainability. This equilibrium has the potential to accompany sustainable growth, by encouraging the creation of innovative urban solutions and reducing inequalities.This article is part of the theme issue 'Co-creating the future: participatory cities and digital governance'.

The digital revolution, fuelled by advancements in social media, Big Data, the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence, is reshaping our urban landscapes into 'participatory cities'. These cities leverage digital technologies to foster citizen engagement, collaborative decision-making and community-driven urban development, thus unlocking new potentials while confronting emerging threats. Such technologies are empowering individuals and organizations in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago. They do, however, introduce new risks and vulnerabilities that must be carefully managed. Hence, socio-technical innovation is urgently needed. In this connection, open-source technologies, participatory approaches and new forms of governance are becoming more popular and relevant. This theme issue looks into the tangible impacts of these technological advancements, with a focus on participatory cities. It aims to explain how digital tools are used in cities to tackle urban challenges, improve governance and promote sustainability. Through a collection of in-depth analyses, case studies and real-world examples, this issue seeks to offer a comprehensive understanding of the digital governance frameworks underpinning participatory cities. By offering a platform for multidisciplinary discourse, this theme issue endeavours to contribute to the broader narrative of shaping a more resilient, sustainable and democratic urban future in the digital age.This article is part of the theme issue 'Co-creating the future: participatory cities and digital governance'.

Participatory budgeting, as a paradigm for democratic innovations, engages citizens in the distribution of a public budget to projects, which they propose and vote for implementation. So far, voting algorithms have been proposed and studied in social choice literature to elect projects that are popular, while others prioritize a proportional representation of voters' preferences, for instance, the rule of equal shares. However, the anticipated impact and novelty in the broader society by the winning projects, as selected by different algorithms, remains totally under-explored, lacking both a universal theory of impact for voting and a rigorous unifying framework for impact and novelty assessments. This article tackles this grand challenge towards new axiomatic foundations for designing effective and fair voting methods. This is through new and striking insights derived from a large-scale analysis of biases over 345 real-world voting outcomes, characterized for the first time by a novel portfolio of impact and novelty metrics. We find strong causal evidence that equal shares comes with impact loss in several infrastructural projects of different cost levels that have been so far over-represented. However, it also comes with a novel, yet over-represented, impact gain in welfare, education and culture. We discuss the broader implications of these results and how impact loss can be mitigated at the stage of campaign design and project ideation.This article is part of the theme issue 'Co-creating the future: participatory cities and digital governance'.

We explore an augmented democracy system built on off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned to augment data on citizens' preferences elicited over policies extracted from the government programmes of the two main candidates of Brazil's 2022 presidential election. We use a train-test cross-validation set-up to estimate the accuracy with which the LLMs predict both: a subject's individual political choices and the aggregate preferences of the full sample of participants. At the individual level, we find that LLMs predict out of sample preferences more accurately than a 'bundle rule', which would assume that citizens always vote for the proposals of the candidate aligned with their self-reported political orientation. At the population level, we show that a probabilistic sample augmented by an LLM provides a more accurate estimate of the aggregate preferences of a population than the non-augmented probabilistic sample alone. Together, these results indicate that policy preference data augmented using LLMs can capture nuances that transcend party lines and represents a promising avenue of research for data augmentation. This article is part of the theme issue 'Co-creating the future: participatory cities and digital governance'.

Recently the transportation sector has witnessed several new technologically driven disruptions that have amplified the complexity of city planning and policymaking. Traditional well-established processes of decision-making in urban planning and transportation are proving insufficient to deal with this degree of complexity and uncertainty. This paper proposes an alternative approach, combining qualitative and normative urban design, with quantitative and predictive transport modelling. This requires urban designers and transport modellers to co-create goal-driven and agile transport models that act as a heuristic tool to guide planning decisions in early design stages. Heuristic modelling is informed by design optioning and vice versa in an iterative loop. A case study is presented to demonstrate how this approach is operationalized to study the impacts of automated vehicles on urban planning. Design workshops are used as a method to elicit responses from stakeholders, which are used to co-create the simulation models. This collaborative process grounds the research in real-world practice and enhances the communication of design proposals and research findings across disciplines. By integrating design thinking methods with agent-based transport simulations, this approach provides a better understanding of emergent effects in complex urban systems and improves stakeholder engagement in the planning process.This article is part of the theme issue 'Co-creating the future: participatory cities and digital governance'.

Currently, there are increasing attempts to better involve citizens in political decision processes. A successful approach in that regard has been participatory budgeting (PB), which allows citizens to propose projects and then decide how to distribute a given budget over them. Meanwhile, the literature on collective intelligence (CI) has also shown the ability of groups to solve complex problems. Thus, by combining CI and PB, it should be possible for citizens to identify problems and create their own solutions. In this article, we study this possibility by using agent-based models. Specifically, we first show that a system combining CI and PB produces solutions that strongly penalize minorities if the solution quality depends on group size. Then, we introduce an approach that can overcome this issue. Indeed, by using a common knowledge base for the storage of partial solutions, the quality of solutions of minorities can benefit from the work of the majority, thereby promoting fairness. Interestingly, this approach also benefits majorities, as the quality of their solutions is further improved by the work of the minorities, thus reaching better solutions for everyone. This stresses the potential and importance of an open innovation approach, which is committed to information sharing.This article is part of the theme issue 'Co-creating the future: participatory cities and digital governance'.