Simulating Multi-Stakeholder Decision-Making with Generative Agents in Urban Planning

Abstract

Reaching consensus in urban planning is a complex process often hindered by prolonged negotiations, trade-offs, power dynamics, and competing stakeholder interests, resulting in inefficiencies and inequities. Advances in large language models (LLMs), with their increasing capabilities in knowledge transfer, reasoning, and planning, have enabled the development of multi-generative agent systems, offering a promising approach to simulating discussions and interactions among diverse stakeholders on contentious topics. However, applying such systems also carries significant societal and ethical risks, including misrepresentation, privacy concerns, and biases stemming from opinion convergence among agents, hallucinations caused by insufficient or biased prompts, and the inherent limitations of the foundation models. To evaluate the influences of such factors, we incorporate varying levels of real-world survey data and demographic detail, to test agents' performance on two decision-making value frameworks, altruism-driven and interest-driven, on a real-world urban rezoning challenge. This approach evaluates the influence of demographic factors such as race, gender, and age on collective decisions in the design of multi-generative agent systems. Our experimental results reveal that integrating demographic and life-value data enhances the diversity and stability of agent outputs. In addition, communication among the generated agents improves the quality of collective reasoning. These findings provide a predictive framework for decision-makers to anticipate stakeholder reactions, including concerns, objections, and support. By enabling the iterative refinement of proposals before public release, the simulated approach fosters more equitable, and cost-effective decisions in urban planning.