The Platformization of Public Participation: Considerations for Urban Planners Navigating New Engagement Tools

Abstract

Professional urban planners have an ethical obligation to work in the public interestPublic interest. Public input and critique gathered at public meetings and other channels are used to inform planning recommendations to elected officials. Pre-pandemic, the planning profession worked with digital tools, but in-person meetings were the dominant form of public participationPublic participation. The pandemic imposed a shift to digital channels and tools, with the result that planners’ use of technology risks unitizing public participation. As the use of new platforms for public participationPublic participation expands, we argue it has the potential to fundamentally change participation, a process we call platformizationPlatformization. We frame this as a subset of the broader emergence of platform urbanismPlatform urbanism. This chapter evaluates six public participation platforms, identifying how the tools they provide map onto key participation frameworksParticipation frameworks (or frameworks of participation) from ArnsteinArnstein, Sherry (1969), FungFung, Archon (2006), and IAP2IAP2 (2018). Through this analysis, we examine how the platformization of public participationPublic participation poses ethical and scholarly challenges to the work of professional planners.