If this is a planner: Artificial intelligence’s way towards scenario building

In spatial planning and decision-making, communities search for effective approaches and methodologies to organize future strategies. The future workshop approach is a scenario building process that involves expert and non expert agents to create strategies toward achieving future alternatives. Our study group has developed much research and experimentation using this approach, both in real communities and simulated situations. This paper reports an experimentation to investigate the potential usefulness of the involvement of artificial intelligence agents in future workshop approaches. It is an interaction with a search engine equipped with ChatGPT by OpenAI, concerning the simulation of scenarios for a master plan of Bari. The interaction basically develops as a structured interview, in which the artificial intelligence provides information and suggestions to build up future scenarios.