Crafting Cities Together: Co-located Collaboration with Augmented Reality for Urban Design

Abstract Augmented reality revolutionizes the way individuals interact with urban environments, fostering novel collaborative modalities in public space design. Our study introduces 'City Craft', an augmented reality application which empowers users to create and modify urban layouts by selecting, positioning, and editing 3D models collaboratively. We detail the deployment of City Craft in two field studies with 33 participants, where the application was used in public space. Results indicate that when participants were paired on a single device, collaboration was synchronous and involved shared control, whereas larger groups engaged more asynchronously. The consensus among participants is that City Craft invites a new perspective on public space, fosters creativity and a collaborative mindset. We argue in situ use of AR tools such as City Craft increases interest in participating in urban design and can aggregate different views on public space use, which can be further refined collectively. However, City Craft should be complemented with a mix of digital and analog tools across the different stages of the design process.