Every citizen deserves a say in how their city or region develops. Across Latin America, and specifically in Colombia, public participation is built directly into the law, requiring planners to show how community feedback genuinely influences decision-making. Yet processing input from thousands of residents is a massive administrative challenge. This is where artificial intelligence offers a breakthrough: helping planners make sense of public feedback quickly, transparently, and at scale.
To demonstrate how this works, ProBogota Region, AAIRL and MTRL collaborated on a pilot project applying AI to the creation of a strategic regional plan. Unlike traditional city planning, a regional plan looks at the bigger picture creating a long-term vision for how neighboring municipalities can collaborate on shared priorities like transportation, environmental protection, and economic growth.
Engaging entire regions, however, is notoriously difficult. In practice, well-funded interest groups often dominate the conversation, while everyday citizens and marginalized communities are overlooked. By introducing intuitive, AI-powered engagement tools, anyone can participate remotely and instantly, regardless of language, background, or ability, ensuring that the future of the region is shaped by the people who live in it.
Metropolitan Vision 2051
Bogota’s ‘Sabana de Occidente’ has the fastest growing development in Colombia. The region attracts habitants from all parts of the Country that come to live, work, shop, commute or visit;
In recent decades, Bogota’s Occidental Savannah Region has transformed from a group of separate neighboring municipalities and has consolidated into one of the territories with the highest population growth in the country. Today, it stands as a vital urban, economic, and logistical hub connecting Bogotá, Cundinamarca, and central Colombia. Because the region is growing so rapidly, decisions made today about transportation, land use, and public services will impact millions of lives for decades to come.
The figures confirm that in just ten years, the population of El Rosal, Facatativá, Funza, Madrid, and Mosquera grew by 52%. Projections indicate that by 2035 the region will exceed 780,000 inhabitants, driven by the arrival of new households, employment, and economic activity. This growth is no coincidence. Today, Sabana Occidente accounts for nearly 18% of Cundinamarca’s value added, driven by logistics, industry, specialized agriculture, and services, in addition to its role as the western gateway to El Dorado Airport, one of the country’s main logistical hubs.
However, growing rapidly also raises fundamental questions: how to anticipate the infrastructure that such growth demands? How to prevent mobility, services, and urban land from becoming bottlenecks? How to ensure that a larger population translates into greater well-being and competitiveness?
In this context, ProBogotá Región initiated the developed of the Metropolitan Vision 2051, a roadmap that proposes a change in scale for planning: moving from fragmented municipal responses to a shared regional vision capable of organizing growth and turning it into a long-term development opportunity, featuring strategic projects in logistics, mobility, and public transportation.
The Planning Process
Developing a strategic plan entails a long-term commitment to a process that unfolds through structured phases, evolving from a regional diagnostic to an executable action plan.
The strategic plan was developed in four phases:
Conventional in-person and virtual participatory initiatives incorporated into each of the first three phases.
Phase 1 From Diagnosis to Strategic Orientations
Based on the analysis of the territorial context was conducted using both primary and secondary data, a SWOT analysis to identify the weaknesses, strengths, opportunities, and threats across the five key pillars agreed upon by the Executive Committee: 1) Environment and Climate Resilience, 2) Sustainable Mobility, 3) Territorial Vocations, 4) Local Identities, and 5) Economic Development and the Future of Work. The planning team held its first in-person participatory workshop with participants from local government (Municipalities of El Rosal, Facatativá, Funza, Madrid, and Mosquera and Metropolitan Region Bogota, Cundinamarca), academia, associations and private sector to collaboratively develop the region’s strategic vision and guiding orientations using methodologies like back casting and Traffic Light Rating.
The workshop was followed by a Chatbot interaction launched to broaden public reach beyond the invited workshop participants. The first chatbot was designed to elicit the participants’ visions for the region’s future. Over 35 days, users exchanged messages. The chatbot was prompted to generate relevant conversations, after each response, the AI expressed interest and encouraged deeper reflection through generative follow-up questions. A Design Brief Generator synthesized the conversations into seven action themes.
Once the region’s potential was identified, strategic guidelines were established to provide a long-term development vision: I. Biomimetic Habitat II. Cultivating Knowledge III. Logistics for Regional Competitiveness and Development IV. Mobility as a Territorial Catalyst. From these guidelines, ten potential catalyst projects were derived to bring the strategy to life.
Phase 2 From Project Profiling to Prioritization
To directly tackle these challenges, the planning team formulated ten strategic project proposals. Comprehensive project profiles were established for each initiative, incorporating international benchmarking, action plans, and stakeholder identification
An online meeting was convened to evaluate and prioritize the proposed projects, bringing participants (experts, local government, academia, associations and private sector). As part of the co-creation exercise to build a collective territorial vision, a governance framework was established around a Technical Committee and an Executive Committee.
The Technical Committee was tasked with researching, processing, and consolidating technical inputs based on the methodology designed by ProBogotá for review and approval by the Executive Committee, which comprised representatives from academia, the public and private sectors, and civil society organizations.
To identify which of the ten strategic projects offered the highest impact and feasibility for regional stakeholders, a prioritization methodology was applied. Using a multi-criteria matrix evaluating environmental, economic, political, and social impact and viability, members of both the Technical and Executive Committees reached a consensus on the scoring for each initiative.
This prioritization process applied an impact and feasibility assessment methodology developed by the Bogota Chamber of Commerce (CCB) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). The prioritization process applied an evaluation methodology that identified three projects for detailed design, with two projects receiving closely comparable scores.
The second chatbot interaction was used to gather input from broader publics, contributing to the prioritization of projects. The chatbot recorded interactions during 62 days. Completed votes exceeded those cast in a parallel online expert meeting and produced a clearer ranking.
For this second phase, an interactive voting module was designed to identify citizens’ primary areas of interest and their preferred projects. Participants were instructed to select a strategic guideline to explore its corresponding project proposals, followed by a vote for their top choice. Charli encouraged participants to repeat this process as many times as needed to discover all the proposed projects.
Leveraging artificial intelligence, Charli generated personalized explanations for both the strategic guidelines and the individual projects. By adapting pre-defined planning text into natural language and the participant’s preferred language, the tool enhanced communication and comprehension while gathering valuable community feedback.
Once a participant selected their top project, a tailored conversation was initiated to understand the underlying motivations behind their vote.
Notably, two of the top-voted community projects aligned directly with the highest-ranked projects selected by the Executive Committee: Integrated Sustainable Mobility System and City-Building Public Transit. The third being Regional Logistics and Supply Hub.
Phases 3 and 4 From a feasibility study to Action Plan
Detailed project development and a depth analysis were conducted by the planners for the three prioritized projects, integrating urban, regulatory, and socioeconomic evaluations of the study area. The results were presented to the governance framework for deliberation and approval, followed by the development of an Action Plan for Strategic Management based on the intervention schedules and budgets; a management roadmap and potential funding sources.
CHARLI a new Participatory Planning AI tool
Our chatbot Charli was developed through a collaborative research consortium, the project gave planners the opportunity to design their own AI tool, conceptualizing the chatbot as a socio-technical infrastructure. Charli derived from the Spanish verb charlar, “to chat”, was integrated into WhatsApp, an instant messaging platform, to provide a familiar and accessible user experience. WhatsApp’s voice messaging and mobile accessibility features enhanced inclusivity across diverse user groups, including youth, older adults, individuals with emerging literacy, non-native language speakers, as well as participants who are blind, Deaf, or hard of hearing.
Charli was designed to engage people in natural conversations on WhatsApp, using progressive questions to explore their local perspectives in depth. By leveraging a familiar and accessible platform, Charli also made it effortless for participants to join in via voice messages. Its inclusion in mobile data plans in Colombia also enabled participation without additional data costs
The chatbot was designed through a structured process. During the ideation stage, the planners defined the specific participatory objectives of each chatbot deployment, including the planning topics to be addressed, the intended user groups, and the type of public input to be collected. The design stage involved translating these objectives into conversational flows, question sequences, and response logics, as well as defining the tone, language, and interaction style of the chatbot.
Charli is:
- Scalable
- Replicable
- Language Agnostic
- Accessible 24/7
Unlike rule-based chatbots that are based on scripted decision trees and pre-programmed responses, LLM-based chatbots are capable of open-ended natural dialog, which also risks inaccuracies, hallucinations, and embedded biases that may undermine trust and distort public understanding. Without adequate human oversight, such systems may inadvertently propagate misinformation, reinforce existing inequalities, or misrepresent critical community perspectives. Accordingly, the integration of LLMs and chatbots into urban planning processes requires proactive mitigation strategies, including transparent system design, systematic bias detection, and sustained human oversight.
OUTCOMES Combining research and participative planning
With the purpose of enriching our conversations, and the goal of producing a regional strategic plan that is sensitive to the visions, desires and needs of the diverse populations, we launched an accessible 24/7, language agnostic AI chatbot that will collect your inputs, because every opinion matters
Drawing on a two-year case study in Bogotá, Colombia, the findings provide practitioner-centered evidence on when conversational AI extends democratic capacity versus when institutional conditions risk substituting genuine deliberation. Read more
The resulting Sabana Occidente Strategic Development Plan 2051 proposes a conceptual foundation for the regional land-use model. Designed to guide and reinforce this vision within spatial planning processes, the framework seeks to maximize efficiency in executing prioritized strategic projects. Crucially, this proposal does not constitute a formal land-use plan (POT plan de ordenamiento territorial) in itself. Rather, it offers a conceptual development framework intended to serve as a technical and strategic benchmark for regional project prioritization, thereby reinforcing local autonomy and the regional metropolitan dynamics that underpin its implementation.
Published plan
ProBogotá Región. (2025). Plan estratégico de desarrollo para Sabana Occidente [Documento técnico]. https://www.probogota.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Sabana-Occidente_V3-05-diciembre-2025_web.pdf
Published paper
This published study evaluates how planners assess the integration of LLM-based chatbots into participatory urban planning.
Dortheimer, J., Oren, M. L., & Sprecher, A. (2026). Automating Consultation? Urban Planners and Chatbot-Based AI-Mediated Participation. Journal of Urban Technology, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2026.2693907
Award winning
“Charla con Charli”: AI chatbot for Bogota’s Occidental Savannah’s inclusive Strategic Plan won the first place in the 2024 GO SMART Award, presented by the Global Organization of Smart Cities (GO SMART), during the Smart City Summit & Expo (SCSE) held in Taipei, Taiwan, on March 12, 2024.
What we learned
- Consultation-mode AI systems are not neutral interfaces, but socio-technical pipelines that shape public knowledge and require scrutinizing who controls the underlying logic.
- Practical challenges and realities of incorporating generative AI into public participation, teaches us that these tools often demand significant interaction design efforts rather than simply automating away routine workloads.
- Appreciate the Irreplaceability of Deliberation. Artificial intelligence can scale data collection and broaden public listening, yet cannot substitute for authentic citizen conversation, consensus-building, and institutional accountability in decision-making.
- Planning is a transformative, long-term driver that can reduce inequalities through community participation, while empowering practitioners to step beyond neutral facilitation and exercise critical professional judgment as collaborative enablers and partners.
WHO WE ARE
Consortium ProBogota Region+AAIRL+MRTL
Research Team
Dr. Michelle L. Oren, Research Leader, VR, Faculty of Architecture, Technion IIT
Dr. Jonathan Dortheimer, PI, Head of AAIRL, School of Engineering and Design, TUM
Prof. Aaron Sprecher, PI, Co-director of MTRL, Faculty of Architecture, Technion IIT
Dr. Or Haim Anidjar, NLP expert, School of Computer Science, Ariel University
ProBogota Region Team
María Carolina Castillo, President
Bibiana Rodríguez, Director of Sustainable Urban Development)
Martin Anzellini, Director of Smart Cities
Cristina Hermida, Urban Projects Coordinator
Ricardo García, Designer
Contributors
Nicolás Gutiérrez (Coordinator)
Natalia Silvia Mora (Subsecretary of Territorial Planning of Bogotá)
GOBERNACIÓN Y MUNICIPIOS
Gobernador de Cundinamarca
Alcalde de El Rosal
Alcalde de Facatativá
Alcaldesa de Funza
Alcalde de Madrid
Alcalde de Mosquera
Director general, Región Metropolitana Bogotá Cundinamarca
