Authors: Zhen Li, Yanliu Lin, Junyao He, and Chun Yang.
Corresponding author: Chun Yang, Hong Kong Baptist University.
Abstract
Implementing artificial intelligence (AI) technology in urban planning is challenged by technological abstraction, uncertainty, contention, and administrative fragmentation and complexity. While existing studies have examined AI deployment pathways and policy outcomes in urban planning, there is still a need to better understand the underlying mechanisms that condition this institutionalization process. This paper conceptualizes discourse AI opportunity structure (DAOS) as a mechanism that determines which AI-related ideas are considered sensible, realistic, and legitimate. We propose that DAOS’s stability, selectivity and socially constructed nature can explain the operational logics of embedding AI in planning practices. China have undergone large-scale AI experimentations alongside an intensive proliferation of policy initiatives, making a critical case for understanding the institutionalization of technology under a centralized hierarchy. We employ a summative content analysis of central-level policy documents, triangulated with policy interpretations. Findings show that, since 2015, the state structures AI agendas by constructing meanings across the sensible-realistic-legitimate triad within continuous policy initiatives. AI institutionalization is characterized by stability of policy issuing, selective mobilization of certain narratives, and new actors governing funding, ownership, provision, and regulation. State narratives promote proactive governmental leadership and immediate technological scaling, yet constrain the reflexive spaces required for ethical and political contestation around AI. The state stabilizes the meaning of AI deployment while leaving room for contextualized practices. DAOS is transferable to examine how other emerging technologies in other political contexts are constructed and how such constructions may give rise to certain spatial-technological consequences.
Keywords: artificial intelligence; urban planning; institutionalization; discourse; China; governance.