Abstract
There has been a recent shift in England towards empowering citizens to shape their neighbourhoods. However, current methods of participation are unsuitable or unwieldy for many people. In this paper, we report on ChangeExplorer, a smart watch application to support citizen feedback, to investigate the extent to which digital wearables can address barriers to participation in planning. The research contributes to both technology-mediated citizen involvement and urban planning participation methods. The app leverages in-situ, quick interactions encouraging citizens to reflect and comment on their environment. Taking a case study approach, the paper discusses the design and deployment of the app in a local planning authority through interviews with 19 citizens and three professional planners. The paper discusses the potential of the ChangeExplorer app to address more conceptual issues, and concludes by assessing the degree to which the technology raises awareness of urban change and whether it could serve as a gateway to more meaningful participatory methods.
Highlights
Urban planning is the discipline that attempts to manage and determine competing uses for land (Cullingworth and Nadin, 2002)
Involvement at earlier stages of planning can have an impact on how places develop, rather than at a later stage, when there is usually only room for minor alterations to individual schemes that have been negotiated between local planning authorities (LPAs) and developers
The notifications were an effective tool in encouraging participants to think about what they would like to change and for them to feel empowered in raising relevant issues
Summary
Urban planning is the discipline that attempts to manage and determine competing uses for land (Cullingworth and Nadin, 2002). Planning in England has two distinct roles; the first is Planning in England has changed over the last few years as a consequence of the Localism Act 2011, with the introduction of neighbourhood planning and neighbourhood forums comprising of citizens, which ‘‘sets out a series of measures with the potential to achieve a substantial and lasting shift in power away from central government and towards local people’’1 (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2011: 1) The impacts of this shift for community governance, planning systems and professionals are still being identified (see, for example, Clarke and Cochrane, 2013; Clifford and Tewdwr-Jones, 2013; Holman and Rydin, 2013). Involvement at earlier stages of planning can have an impact on how places develop, rather than at a later stage, when there is usually only room for minor alterations to individual schemes that have been negotiated between local planning authorities (LPAs) and developers
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