Abstract
Digital information and communication technologies influence not only on urban planning but also citizen participation. The increasing level of politically driven involvement of the public in urban planning processes has led to the development of new participatory technologies and innovative visual tools. Using an empirical case study, the article investigates a completed participation process concerning an e-participation platform in Berlin, while focusing on the following questions: (1) How are visualisations communicatively deployed within e-participation formats? (2) In what ways do citizens communicate a kind of spatial knowledge? (3) Which imaginings of public urban space are constructed through the use of visualisations? The exploration of the communication conditions and the ‘methods’ employed will demonstrate the way participants visually communicate their perceptions and local knowledge as well as how they construct their imagining of urban places. In this context, visualisations in participation processes are understood as products of ‘communicative actions’ (Knoblauch, 2019) that allow people to present their visions in ways that are more understandable and tangible to themselves and others. Within this context, by the example of the state-driven e-platform ‘meinBerlin’ a discussion will trace how far digitalised and visualised communicative actions from Berlin residents contribute to the social construction of urban spaces and the extent to which they can be considered a part of cooperative planning.
Highlights
Since the second half of the 19th century, approaches to urban design and planning for the emerging modern industrial society have been subject to perpetual reorientation and change, which coincided with the age of rapidly developing information and communication technologies
A core question for us, which addresses a gap in the research, is: how do digital tools and their social uses influence the communication of perceptions and conceptualisations of urban spaces? how can the communication and communicative construction of urban futures be best described? Using the example of a digital participation platform in Berlin, Germany, we will examine a distinct participation process concerning the topic: ‘Report Noise Sites!’ (Lärmorte Melden!)
Our study is guided by the following questions: (1) How are visualisations communicatively used within e-participation? (2) How do participants communicate spatial knowledge? (3) Which conceptualisations of urban space are constructed using visualisations? To answer the questions posed, we developed a methodology which allows for in-depth analyses, which can be applied to interpretations concerning both of visual and text-based data
Summary
Since the second half of the 19th century, approaches to urban design and planning for the emerging modern industrial society have been subject to perpetual reorientation and change, which coincided with the age of rapidly developing (digital) information and communication technologies. A core question for us, which addresses a gap in the research, is: how do digital tools and their social uses influence the communication of perceptions and conceptualisations of urban spaces? Using the example of a digital participation platform in Berlin, Germany, we will examine a distinct participation process concerning the topic: ‘Report Noise Sites!’ (Lärmorte Melden!). The methodological approach applied and the process of analysis through which texts and images regarding residential communication will be described, while Section 5 will examine how participants linguistically and visually conceive of noise spaces in Berlin.
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