Augmented Reality and Youth Groups | Medium

Research case study of AR & Youth Participation for the 100.000 New Trees initiative in Oslo, Norway

Three of the greatest challenges facing humanity today are digitization, urbanization, and climate change. In the Digital Urban Living research group at AHO — the Oslo School of Architecture and Design — we attempt to look at these areas in a holistic manner. Through themes of democracy, technology, and sustainability we hope to contribute to global issues from within the unique vantage point of the Nordic region, which is typified by a high degree of trust between citizens and government.

One of the major questions surrounding our research is the international “Smart City” trend and its effects on policy. We’ve found here that smart city projects usually consist of a utopian vision for immersing cities in new technology – propagated by big tech companies like Google and Cisco. However, we’ve noticed that such projects often result in disappointing or even anti-democratic results, which scholars such as Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff have noted create a situation of “surveillance capitalism”, in which citizens’ data is harvested for private gain.

Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs proposed “Smart City” for Quayside in Toronto was recently stopped. Many critics cited the company’s inability to secure citizens' rights through participation as a key factor in its failure.

A common fault we notice is that many smart city projects have a technocratic, top-down methodology of implementation that ignores local communities. A recent report of IBM’s smart city project in Rio De Janeiro found that the project “failed to go beyond high-tech marketing rhetoric and help real people living in the city.” Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto was also recently stopped, with many critics citing privacy concerns. This suggests that big tech forgets to prioritize the real users of the city - its citizens - and the democratic procedures of city planning meant to preserve their rights.

Youth participant places a new birch tree through Augmented Reality (AR) with a tablet.

In prototyping the “Smart City” in Oslo, Norway, we have taken our findings from this international trend and decided to do things a bit differently. This doesn’t mean abandoning technology for neo-Luddism, after all, Norway is one of the most digital countries in the world, but instead looking at ways in which to digitize the city within the legal structure of the Nordic model. This means researching new technology while simultaneously securing citizens’ rights through user participation and democratic planning procedures.

Prototyping in this manner has allowed us to form unique partnerships between business, education, and governance. In the summer of 2020, a groundbreaking collaboration between AHO, The Municipality of Oslo, and the company Udaru (An acronym for “User-driven augmented reality urbanism)” was initiated. The goal of the project was to combine Augmented Reality (AR) with Youth group participation for the “100 000 New Trees in Oslo” plan.

Oslo plans to cut emissions by 95 percent by 2030, despite being one of Europe’s fastest-growing cities. Among recent urban planning policy is the creation of a car-free center and to replace some of this space with the planting of 100 000 New Trees by 2030 (which this project deals with). Its growing pains are also starting to show, where gentrification is forcing citizens out of their neighborhoods. The Municipality, therefore, wanted to look at planting trees in some of the areas with the most need for inclusion.

The study involved the use of AR with youth participants between the ages of 14–16, who were commissioned by the City of Oslo to carry out the study through a mandate given by the Planning and Building Agency in Oslo and the Oslo Center for Urban Ecology, ByKuben. The local districts of Gamlebyen, Sagene, and Groruddalen recruited the youth participants through their regular community work and provided the physical areas for study.

The reason for such a study involves a core tenet of urban planning legislationwhich since the 1970s has centered around the citizenry’s right to participation. Originally proposed as an 8-step “Ladder of citizen participation” by Shelley Arnstein in 1969, the goal is to give citizens the ability to make their own choices about their environments. In practice, this means that whenever there are changes proposed to a local neighborhood, the authorities are supposed to allow the communitiy to participate in that decision.

The selection of youth groups as users for this study was not random. In Norway, all children have the right to be heard and their views must be included in the assessment based on the child’s age and maturity. To achieve this, the Norwegian Directorate for Children, Youth and Family Affairs (Bufdir) has implemented Arnstein’s ladder through a tailored version specifically for youth and children, designed by Roger Hart.

The municipality provided us with a list of trees that could plant in the city. The youth participants then used AR to place trees, shrubs, and urban furniture digitally within designated areas of their local neighborhoods. After making their AR designs, the data was collected and delivered to the Municipality. The presentations were attended by the Vice Mayor of Oslo, Kamzy Gunaratnam, who said that the youth were an “inspiration for the rest of the city.”

Our study is still in its preliminary stages. So far, we see that AR offers several benefits for urban planning participation for youth groups. This is likely due to the high level of expertise the youth have in operating new technology such as AR. We also see that the data we collected requires negotiation between privacy concerns, ownership of the user data, and the need for the specific data for the tree planning work, such as positioning. We here the need for cohesive use of technology for planning, and perhaps more importantly, the need for planning technology itself.

We also saw that the proposals created by the youth maintained a surprisingly high level of skill in landscape architecture, suggesting that through the participation study they also learned about the design of the built environment. This was an unexpected, yet pleasant surprise for the research team. In short, we may need to rethink how we create and design public spaces and cities in able to be more inclusive in our decision-making.

And still, we are far from done. As the project continues into 2030, the next step is to coordinate the AR youth designs with the actual, physical tree planting, which will start in the Spring of 2021 (when the snow melts). This will be an important step in the development of the Oslo Smart City, in which we will see whether the youth work can actually be implemented.

As the project expands, so does our responsibility to provide objective data about the pros and cons of AR and youth groups, while further investigating the relationship between cities, technology, and democracy.

This article was first published by Medium.