Lunds universitet/Institutionen för kulturgeografi och ekonomisk geografi
Abstract
The Swedish government has recently been proposing for a digitization of the spatial plans. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how this digitization would affect the public participation during the process of creating a spatial plan. This will be done by testing the theory of Ladder of participation, created by Sherry Arnstein in 1969, and a theory of participation stairs created by Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SALAR). Riges, a cooperation between five municipalities in northern Sweden within digitization of spatial plans, is the main case studied in this paper. But also other minor cases are presented and studied. The methods are mainly literature and interviews. The literature is municipal reports and qualitative interviews with municipal officials within spatial planning and GIS. Main perspective of the collected data in this paper is GIS, since GIS is one of the main tools of digitization. This paper shows that the digitization affects the public participation in a very small extent
