Planning with citizens: Implementation of an e-planning platform and analysis of research needs

Abstract

Citizen participation should be an essential part of an urban planning process if the needs of the local population are to be addressed. Citizen participation should also improve acceptance of private construction projects by residents that live in or near such development. A complementary form of citizen participation to public planning meetings is to permit citizen engagement via Web 2.0 technologies, which also has the potential to get citizens involved that are usually difficult to reach. We aim to build a social, i.e. participatory, planning platform that allows technology savvy citizens to inform themselves of future and ongoing development projects and to also discuss them online. In this work we discuss the functional needs and context-of-use constraints of such an e-planning platform. A conceptual model of the technical architecture is outlined and a prototype implementation is presented. This prototype is built on free and open source software components, including a social network, to enable platform adoption in other locations. Finally, we discuss the research needs that are to be addressed if the development of participatory e-planning platforms should advance.