Accessibility Instruments In Planning Practice: Bridging The Implementation Gap

Accessibility concepts are increasingly acknowledged as fundamental to understand cities and urban regions. Accordingly, accessibility instruments have been recognised as valuable support tools for land-use and transport planning. However, despite the relatively large number of instruments available in the literature, they are not widely used in planning practice. This paper aims to explore why accessibility instruments are not widely used in planning practice. To this end, we focus our research on perceived user-friendliness and usefulness of accessibility instruments. First, we surveyed some instrument developers, providing an overview of the characteristics of accessibility instruments available and on developers’ perceptions of their user-friendliness in planning practice. Second, we brought together developers and planning practitioners in some local workshops across Europe and Australia, where participants were asked to use insights provided by accessibility instruments for the development of planning strategies. We found that most practitioners are convinced of the usefulness of accessibility instruments in planning practice, as they generate new and relevant insights for planners. Findings suggest that not only user-friendliness problems but mainly organisational barriers and lack of institutionalisation of accessibility instruments, are the main causes of the implementation gap. Thus user-friendliness improvement may provide limited contributions to the successful implementation of accessibility concepts in planning practice. In fact, there seems to be more to gain from the active and continued engagement of instrument developers with planning practitioners and the institutionalisation of accessibility planning

Smart Governance: Opportunities for technologically-mediated citizen co-production

Citizens increasingly contribute directly to the evolution of sustainable cities, in particular where new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) promise to transform urban governance into ‘Smart city governance’ and where ICTs are integrated in strategies for citizen participation and the co-production of public services and policy. This article provides a multi-disciplinary understanding of Smart city governance, including new insights around the opportunities for citizen engagement in the co-production of service-delivery and decision-making. Using findings from a review of Smart cities literature and practice, the article aims to establish the breadth of Smart city initiatives which emphasise citizen participation and the realities of delivering such initiatives in complex city environments. Emphasising the emerging role of the technologically ‘empowered’ citizen, a new conceptual model is presented, where mutual trust, shared understanding and new opportunities for co-production emerge in an environment mediated by new technology – this form of Smart governance is referred to here as ‘technologically-mediated municipal reciprocity’

Lessons learned from participatory land use planning with high-resolution remote sensing images in Tanzania: Practitioners' and participants’ perspectives

AbstractParticipatory mapping (PM) solutions have become common in many sectors of society to enhance engagement of the local communities in planning processes. Especially in data scarce regions, like Africa, PM that captures local knowledge in spatially explicit form is an important tool for integrating previously non-existent spatial knowledge in to collaborative planning. Despite the increasing usage of PM solutions, there still lies a gap in our knowledge of the influence and enabling factors of PM adoption in real-world decision-making processes. We studied practitioners’ and participants’ perceptions on benefits and limitations of PM that uses high-resolution remote sensing imagery to engage with participants in six use cases in Tanzania. We conducted interviews and one group discussion with practitioners, and feedback surveys among PM participants. According to the experiences of the practitioners and participants, PM methods based on high-resolution remote sensing images have increased practitioners’ work quality and professional competence, and enhanced participants’ active participation and spatial understanding for informed decision-making. Technical challenges and lack of skilled experts and institutional support were commonly identified limitations. Based on the users’ perceptions we identified previously recognized enabling factors such as supportive policy environment but also context specific factors; removal of disincentives and wider awareness raising. Moreover, advocacy among policymakers on the benefits of participatory decision-making and geospatial technologies is needed to build their ownership of the new governance practices.</p

Village landscape from near and far : Participatory geospatial methods to integrate local knowledge into formal land use planning in Tanzania

In this dissertation, I explore the use of participatory geospatial methods in improving local knowledge integration and inclusiveness in formal land use planning in Tanzania. Communities and governments in the Global South are tackling multiple challenges to human well-being and ecological integrity. Participatory land use planning that combines knowledge sources and balances needs and values of different land users has been promoted as a prerequisite for addressing these challenges in a socio-ecologically sustainable way. Land use planning practice requires tools such as participatory geospatial methods that capture local spatial knowledge (LSK) on human-environment relationships in forms that are compatible with spatial planning standards. There exists, however, little evidence on the usability and impact of these methods in formal planning processes. For my research, Tanzania offers an exciting opportunity to examine the use of these methods due to its decentralized land and natural resource policies and rapid digitalization of planning processes. Through case studies I study what LSK reveals about land use and land use management-related decision-making, how existing Tanzanian land use planning policies and practices integrate LSK into planning decision-making, and I then codevelop participatory geospatial methods capable of integrating LSK into formal land use planning and study their benefits and adoption potential. Finally, I reflect on the limitations of the geospatial methods in representing LSK and diverse perspectives in these processes. The research is based on transdisciplinary and mixed methods approach. I frame my assessments of existing policies and practices with literature-based criteria, which I develop for each study. In each study, I also collaborate with Tanzanian practitioners at various research phases and develop a practitioners’ manual to guide the use of our participatory geospatial method. I combine interviews, group discussions, surveys, participatory mapping exercises and observations to study the relationship between people, their land uses and environment (Article I) and people’s experiences in planning processes (Articles II, III and IV). The findings show that local knowledge is instrumental in identifying land use patterns in the landscape and in explaining the rationale behind local land use, its dynamics and forest-farmland conversion (Article I). The analysis of existing policies and practices reveals that despite the emphasis on inclusive and active participation of local communities, the planning practice does not capture LSK in a georeferenced form or use geospatial tools to facilitate planning deliberation (Articles II and III). Subsequently the plans fail to recognize local priorities and complexities of land use. The codeveloped participatory geospatial method was observed to increase the quality of spatial data in which LSK is captured, and support learning, deliberation and spatial understanding among participants and practitioners during the formal planning process (Articles III and IV). The planning practitioners identified several benefits of the geospatial methods to their work, which is a strong incentive for adoption (Article IV). Wider adoption, however, requires efforts in geospatial education and on-the-job training to practitioners, as well as general commitment to participatory processes at all administrative levels. While the participatory geospatial methods improve integration of LSK into planning decision-making, future research and method development should focus on recognizing the diversity of local spatial knowledge and community priorities. Here self-determination of what LSK is collected and how it is visualized and used plays an important role

A comparison of the perceived added value of PSS applications in group settings

Contains fulltext : 147434.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)Research on planning support systems (PSS) is increasingly paying attention to the added value that PSS applications have for planning practice. Whereas early studies tended to have a rather conceptual focus, recent studies have paid more attention to empirics. Although this is a step forward, there is still a notable gap in the literature: a dearth of empirical evaluations of PSS applications from a comparative perspective. This paper addresses this gap, based on an earlier published conceptual framework that identifies the potential added values of PSS applications. The paper also tentatively explores the effect of three explanatory factors: support capabilities of the PSS, usability, and the context. In doing so, it reports on research of four PSS applications in The Netherlands. The research method consisted of questionnaires completed directly after the session, open interviews and conversations with stakeholders, and observations. With regard to added value as perceived by the participants, the findings indicate that learning, both about the object and about others, was a key perceived added value in all four cases, despite differences in context, support capabilities and usability scores. Moreover, although usability perceptions of the PSS applications varied, overall they were relatively positive. Context appears to have a substantial effect on the perceived added value of the PSS application, making it hard to distil the exact effect of the support capabilities and usability perceptions. The effect of context is one of the topics that could be picked up in further studies into the added value of PSS. One way to accomplish this in future research is by comparing a larger number of different PSS applications in different contexts, resulting in a higher n in order to enable correlational analyses and cross-national comparisons to better grasp the influence of the institutional context.11 p