Abstract
Citizen participation should be an essential part of an urban planning process if the needs of the local population are to be addressed. Citizen participation should also improve acceptance of private construction projects by residents that live in or near such development. A complementary form of citizen participation to public planning meetings is to permit citizen engagement via Web 2.0 technologies, which also has the potential to get citizens involved that are usually difficult to reach. We aim to build a social, i.e. participatory, planning platform that allows technology savvy citizens to inform themselves of future and ongoing development projects and to also discuss them online. In this work we discuss the functional needs and context-of-use constraints of such an e-planning platform. A conceptual model of the technical architecture is outlined and a prototype implementation is presented. This prototype is built on free and open source software components, including a social network, to enable platform adoption in other locations. Finally, we discuss the research needs that are to be addressed if the development of participatory e-planning platforms should advance.
Highlights
The advent of social networks, such as Facebook.com, Google+, and renren.com, and the emergence of communication applications for mobile phones, such as WhatsApp, have changed the way people communicate, in countries with high Internet uptake (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007; Pew Research Center, 2011)
We suggest for example a (1) “view service” that generates map like images, a (2) data “download service”, to retrieve data or subsets of data, (3) a “processing service” that will handle evaluation of development plans using predefined models, e.g. a walkability model or an environmental impact model, (4) + (5) two “discovery services”, one for planning data and one for social network data, which allow searching of both data streams, and (6) a “social data mining service”
Following a usercentred design (UCD) approach made us aware of the different types of user groups that the platform should serve, and the different contexts in which a user might interact with the platform
Summary
The advent of social networks, such as Facebook.com, Google+, and renren.com, and the emergence of communication applications for mobile phones, such as WhatsApp, have changed the way people communicate, in countries with high Internet uptake (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007; Pew Research Center, 2011) Likewise these communication tools have the potential to shape (urban) planning and in the near future. The most widely adopted platforms for citizen-agency Web 2.0 engagement with a spatial/mapbased focus have been Ushahidi.com, a participatory crisis information platform, fixmystreet.com, and shareabouts.org for street safety reporting and bikeparking allocation. We add to this list the more recent North American MindMixer platform which allows to discuss planning issues with citizens. We discuss research topics that need to be addressed to move the development of participatory planning platforms forward
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