Social Media and the GeoWeb Deliver Participatory Planning

Ahmed Abukhater

Planning 2.0—The Next Generation of Planning Support Systems

Planners constantly make decisions and have to think on their feet. Though the voices of elected leaders and officials ring loudly in their minds, planners must be careful to listen closely to the voices of the citizens they serve. Planning for the people requires involving communities from the very onset of the planning process, which must be comprehensible, transparent, legitimate, and interactive. When planners fail to engage communities and only follow the status quo, the outcomes are undesirable at best.

To engage citizens today, it is imperative to communicate in new ways and provide collaborative decision-making platforms. Effectively exchanging information in planning means expanding the communication footprint, moving beyond technical jargon and the resulting language boundaries. It also means holding conversations outside the traditional in-person community meetings and forums to reach across the whole community.

Social media tools and the GeoWeb answer this call and planners are already utilizing these Web 2.0 technologies to create effective planning support system (PSS) platforms that cater to planning processes and workflow needs. This emerging Planning 2.0 environment fosters the bidirectional citizenry participation that is so critical today. Open, accountable, interactive government takes us to a higher level of democracy, where citizens are empowered in new, bold ways to help shape the decision-making process and define desired future conditions. For this to happen on a broad scale, a profound transformation in the way planners conduct their business is required.

How should planners leverage Planning 2.0 to connect with their communities?

  • Lester King | Senior Planner, Ecology & Environment |

    Planning in the web 2.0 era suggests an increased ability for stakeholders to participate in decision making. It should now be much easier to receive feedback from stakeholders based on the plethora of devices and platforms out there. Fostering stakeholder participation and creating forums for people to have their say is very important in the planning process. However I have always found that the planner, as facilitator and mediator, serves a very important function especially in forums with diverse participants. That function is to receive diverse comments, synthesize the comments, and reflect them back to the stakeholders so that participants have a more enhanced awareness of diverse viewpoints. Maybe this is web 3.0, since for now I have found that the general trend is for everyone to have their say rather than for everyone to contribute to developing unified solutions.

  • Matthew Baker | Instructor, Educational Services |

    Planning 2.0 follows the concept of Web 2.0, engaging users with rich internet applications and dynamic services. From a technical standpoint, these tools now offer the possibility to not only show a picture through the web, but to gather feedback from the picture – and best of all, the picture is an interactive map of the actual design concept, and the feedback goes into a database! Working with ArcGIS 10 has already opened up my eyes to what is possible with new web-GIS technology. Planners already using GIS are familiar with making maps. ArcGIS Server has allowed us to put those maps on the web using the rich cartography chosen to visualize the information. ArcGIS 10 will take mapping and planning further by giving users the ability to ‘click’ on a feature they like, and submit a comment about the proposed design. Picture a re-development in an abandoned area of a city. A planner has come up with a proposal for a land-use scenario, and would like to publish the map, and gather feedback via the web. A simple application is developed with a basemap and overlay of the plan. The application is wired to pop up with an info window with some information about the features on the map, be it a bike lane, mixed-use commercial area, park, or urban farm. The application user – i.e. the citizen of the proposed development – can click to add comments about the feature. The value of this technology is that it directly includes the public into the decision making process. Did a planner forget something? Would a park be better located in this area? Would a light rail stop be better placed here? As suggested in previous comments however, we must ensure the digital divide does not leave some citizens out of this process. These applications, however, run in a simple web browser, a lightweight client, accessible from libraries, living rooms, and mobile applications alike, putting this power into anyone within reach of the internet.

Login to the Spatial Roundtable

(Use your ESRI Global Account)

Use your ESRI global login

Create New Account | Forgot Your Password?