Reflections on deploying community-driven visualisations for public engagement in urban planning

Abstract

Publicly available visualisations play an increasing role in enabling wider audiences to contribute to debates to shape place futures. In this article, we unpack such contributions to consider the conceptualisation, actualisation and deployment of these visualisations as separate entities that each require development and reflection. In doing so we draw on our experiences of using two public engagement tools that utilise visualisations of residents’ comments. Through this we explore the limitations of visualisations in public engagement designed to support differing levels of debate and their abilities to support abstract topics and geographic associations. We discuss how visualisations alone do not produce actions and how they need to be rooted in wider conversations about a place to lead to insights and action. The article calls for the linking of visualisations for place meaning and place action at different stages of much broader public engagement projects to unlock the potentials present in them in the mediatisation of built environment outcomes.