Data for Participation and Participation as Data: Supporting Incremental Participatory Decision-Making in Urban Planning

Current literature on urban planning explores how to use ICT to support citizen participation. Advances in open data and its possibility to easily represent data on maps, opens up new opportunities to support participation and decision making in urban projects. This article investigates how spatial planners today use data to inform the participatory process. Looking at the par- ticipation process as collaboration between planners and citizens allows us to see the participation process itself as generating data that informs future deci- sions and processes. Based on a case study of a participatory process of an ur- ban renewal project, the article investigates the use of structured and unstruc- tured data for participation. The fieldwork is conducted using ethnographically inspired methods, based on participatory observations, interviews and docu- ment analysis. As a result, the incremental decisions, the resulting process, and the data used in this process are mapped out. Besides the need to accommodate heterogeneous data and to allow for integrated analysis of data specific to the neighborhood under development, the important result is that the participatory process itself generates data that informs the further process and the decisions that are part of it. The paper concludes with design implications for decision support for urban planning. In future research, the intention is to explore these implications in a Participatory Design process

Stakeholders, Roles, Workflows and Requirements

Decisions makers in cities and urban areas continuously have to make important decisions to react or proactively identify new challenges, problems and conflicts. But as cities and urban areas have become more complex, well‐founded decisions have also become more difficult to make. Decisions cannot be purely based on intuitions but require a basis for assessments, which put great constraints on decision makers and decision making procedures in terms of expertise and knowledge. New technology and sources of information can, however, support decision makers and facilitate the decision making procedures, but at the moment these possibilities are not being leveraged to a greater extent in urban governance

Urban Decision-making and Expert Integration

The aim of this Deliverable 2.2 on Urban Decision-making and Expert Integration is to provide an overview of existing approaches, processes, tools and techniques to urban decision-making, and the usage of expert knowledge as well as data and more and more ‘big data’ to support decisions