Simulation-based evaluation of the impact of civic literacy on participatory urban planning: A study of introducing Shared Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

As participatory urban planning has gained traction recently, the consensus-building process among citizens has become crucial to its success. In particular, the level of understanding among citizens regarding new technologies or systems in the city, referred to as civic literacy in this study, can significantly impact the quality and speed of consensus building. While frameworks exist to replicate this consensus-building process, no research has considered differences in civic literacy or applied them to participatory urban planning issues. This study proposes a simulation-based method to quantitatively evaluate how civic literacy influences the consensus-building process for new policies. Consensus building process of the introduction of Shared Autonomous Vehicles (SAVs) was examined as a case study. The python-based multi-agent simulator was built based on the group decision making framework combining with the level of understanding among citizen stakeholders which is represented by two factors: utility bias from true values and their variance (degree of uncertainty) regarding the benefits of SAVs. Through Monte Carlo simulations with several conditions, we observed significant variations in the patterns of change in both the speed and quality of the consensus-building process due to differences in initial values. For instance, changing the information level can, in some cases, more than double the time required for consensus. This effect varies greatly depending on the rigor of the consensus and the strength of the bias.