Workshops play a central role in the application of planning support systems (PSS) in collaborative planning practice. We conceive of workshops as socio-technical settings in which the characteristics of the PSS instrument are mediated by different factors, such as group dynamics, facilitation and tool involvement by the participants, to result in outcomes desirable for planning. We argue that it is critical to develop an understanding about the definition, facilitation and evaluation of PSS workshops. This chapter sheds light on these aspects of PSS workshops through a detailed discussion of existing empirical research on the topic, as well as our own empirical experience. This includes two brief vignettes of PSS workshops with the PSS Envision Tomorrow in the United States and Urban Strategy in the Netherlands. The chapter concludes with a critical reflection on the role of academic research in initiating and evaluating PSS workshops.

One of the most notable changes to cityscapes worldwide in the past 20 years has been the steady expansion of information and communications technologies (ICTs). Today, urban residents navigate cities with smartphones, track their own activities with digital devices, access public transportation systems with smart cards, and interact with governments through web portals. In urban planning, there is a growing interest in how ICTs may result in new knowledge about cities and be used to improve urban quality of life. Some researchers have begun to probe the burgeoning data sets these new ICTs produce in search of previously hidden patterns (e.g. Townsend, 2015; Bettencourt and West, 2010). For others, ICTs open the possibility of creating new ways to tackle longstanding urban problems; for example, smart city strategies utilizing new technologies to improve urban management (Batty et al., 2012; Goodspeed, 2014; Neirotti et al., 2014). Planning scholars are beginning to tap the new data sources to shed light on classic urban social science questions (e.g. Thakuriah et al., 2014). Finally, new technologies have fueled work by practitioners and scholars to tailor ICTs to support planning tasks with visualization, modeling, and analysis. This category of ICTs has been dubbed planning support systems (PSS) (Harris and Batty, 1993; Klosterman, 1997; Klosterman and Pettit, 2005; Geertman and Stillwell, 2004, 2009; Geertman et al., 2013, 2015).

Recent research has emphasized the importance of workshops as a venue where planning support systems (PSS) are used in planning processes. Empirical studies of these workshops have previously largely overlooked facilitation, in particular the role of a moderator (steering the discussion) and/or a chauffeur (steering the PSS). Drawing on existing facilitation research, we identify four main categories of facilitation interventions: substantive, procedural, relational, and tool-related. We use these categories to develop a novel conceptual framework for facilitation at PSS workshops. We test and develop this framework through semi-structured interviews with eight experienced facilitators of PSS workshops in the US and the Netherlands. The interviews confirm the validity of the intervention categories, but also revealed a wider range of PSS-specific workshop outcomes. We conclude that successful facilitation of PSS workshops requires two different types of facilitation interventions: some to encourage PSS use, and others to prevent PSS domination of the group discussion. Facilitating PSS workshops is mainly about finding the delicate and context-dependent balance between these two extremes.