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

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...

Multi-Level and Multi-Actor Governance: Why it matters for spatial planning

This chapter sheds light on how planning is affected by multi-level (vertical) governance relations that shape an enabling environment for planning decisions and multi-actor (horizontal) governance aspects which are crucial for integrating planning with other policy agendas and effectively engaging citizens and other stakeholders in decision...

Including local knowledge in coastal policy innovation: comparing three Dutch case studies

In the context of a growing emphasis on research and application of citizen engagement methods in environmental planning and management (e.g. Reed 2008; Von Korff et al. 2010), we compare three collaborative activities aimed at finding innovative coastal policy solutions in the Netherlands. In these activities, participants across the citizen...

Co-design in the coastal context

In this research, we set out to investigate the phenomenon of ‘co-design’ and explore the applicability of co-design in the complex coastal context. We have turned to investigating design-oriented, collaborative activities aimed at innovative coastal solutions (co-design) and how they strengthen the development of solutions for coastal problems....

Involving society in restoration and conservation

It is widely acknowledged that ecosystems often cannot be considered as separated from social systems, but that they should rather be seen as interacting, cross-scaled, coupled systems operating on multiple temporal and spatial scales. Humans have an increasing impact on ecosystems worldwide, while at the same time ecosystems are of critical...

Open Data: Growing Up and Getting Specific

Open data has been given a lot of attention in the public. In some situation ‘open by default’ has become established as a core principle, whereas others argue about the limited results and the lack of robust studies demonstrating the value, and point to the risk that open data might turn out to be a short lived policy fad. This special issue...