Rashid Mushkani defended his doctoral thesis, “The Urban Right to AI: Pluralistic Co-Design and Governance of Public Space,” at Université de Montréal on August 24, 2026, completing an interdisciplinary PhD in planning.
The thesis draws on two research projects developed in Montreal in partnership with residents and community organizations: Street Review, which pairs residents’ assessments of streets with AI to map perceived inclusivity, and LIVS, a dataset built with 30 community organizations and used to train and test models that generate images of public space. Across both projects, Mushkani found that people frequently judged the same spaces differently — a finding that led him to argue cities should preserve, rather than smooth over, those differences when making decisions.
The thesis proposes a civic “right to AI” for urban governance: communities should have a role in shaping the AI systems used in city planning, visibility into how those systems are applied, and mechanisms to challenge the decisions that result. Mushkani traces his interest in the question to earlier fieldwork on public parks in Kabul, where questions of access and decision-making power first took hold of his research.
The research was supervised by Shin Alexandre Koseki at the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape and supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec, the New Frontiers in Research Fund, Mitacs, and Université de Montréal, with computing resources from Mila, the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, and Calcul Québec. Mushkani will continue the work through an IVADO-funded postdoctoral fellowship at Université de Montréal.
The full thesis is available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23999
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