Digital Participation in Urban Planning

Digital Participation in Urban Planning: A promising tool or technocratic obstacle to citizen engagement?

Kleinhans, R.J. (TU Delft Urban Studies)
Falco, Enzo (Università di Trento)

Rocco, Roberto (editor)
Bracken, Gregory (editor)
Newton, Caroline (editor)
Dabrowski, Marcin (editor)

2022

Over time, urban planning scholars have studied ways to improve communication and collaboration between ‘experts’ and the ‘public’ in planning processes. Social media and the web 2.0 have strongly affected governments’ communication with citizens. The growth of public participation, Geographic Information Systems and geo-visualisation interfaces have provided many opportunities for citizens to create and share various kinds of location-based information. Digital participatory platforms (DPPs) are a specific type of web-based technology, often adopted by governments for citizen engagement in urban planning. DPPs are explicitly built for engagement and collaboration purposes allowing for user-generated content and include a range of functionalities which transcend and considerably differ from ‘conventional’ social media such as Facebook and Twitter. However, simply establishing DPPs is not enough. Previous research has outlined various challenges towards DPPs attempting to leverage citizen participation in urban planning. This chapter discusses five fundamental challenges to effective citizen participation: 1) access and awareness, 2) sustaining user motivation, 3) expectation management, 4) re-establishing routines and practices, and 5) offline follow-up and decision-making. The main question is how these challenges affect the actual take-up and effectiveness of DPPs. Contrary to the common debate, the chapter will show
that technology is not the main issue. Rather, the way in which DPPs are embedded in a wider participation approach is key to its success.

participation
digital platforms
social media
citizen engagement
crowdsourcing
covid-19

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:145b3348-d029-4779-b79f-28f9d28ec253

TU Delft OPEN Publishing, Delft

978-94-6366-604-6

Teaching, Learning & Researching Spatial Planning

Institutional Repository

book chapter

© 2022 R.J. Kleinhans, Enzo Falco