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.
The technology is here—no doubt. It is ever more simple and accessible and ever more empowering. What should planners do with it, and how? First, I believe it is all about content. The new communication channels and tools ought to provide information that is relevant to the varied urban communities. This is meaningful information that sends clear messages about the community—its condition, issues, prospects, and the forces and factors affecting its future. We (the planners) know very well that the individual citizens and community groups get engaged only when they are directly affected. Second, it is about capacity building. Assuming that all citizens and community groups (if interested) would be able to effectively utilize the technology has been our longstanding miscalculation. There is an uneven landscape of technology usage even among planners and within government organizations, let alone in the broader environment. The high-quality and innovative ideas are not necessarily related to the ability to utilize the technological tools. Insights into both status quo and future solutions are embedded deep within the community. Designing the interfaces that would reach to this depth is the main task that planners face. My notion of “interface” is broad. It includes meeting points, Internet access nodes (in private and public spaces), and opportunities and formats for expressing opinions and ideas. Web 2.0 is here to facilitate those interfaces, but only as part of the overall setting and process. The challenge for planners and their technical support staff is to carefully integrate the new tools in the well thought-out exchanges with the public. It is an art of public debate that could be enhanced with Planning 2.0 along with other ICTs. It would be nice if this forum would share examples of such effective integration and let us all know if there are observable differences that would inspire and excite us.
What is the role of Web 2.0 in the planning process? Will it replace traditional civic engagement processes or augment and reinforce those already in place? Effective planning processes should include a civic engagement and a communication strategy to ensure that the broadest involvement of stakeholders and the public is made possible. The most common form of civic engagement is the town hall meeting. This type of meeting is typically focused on a single topic area, which can be either very broad or quite narrowly focused (e.g. future community vision or project input). The strength is in its openness and inclusiveness, but its weakness is that it is still limited in both attendance and the ability of its participants to continue to provide input following the meeting. More sophisticated techniques are based on creating a hierarchy of engagement opportunities that extend from steering committees, advisory boards, topic-specific task forces, and town hall meetings. The strength of these more sophisticated processes is that they offer additional structure and ongoing involvement, but their weakness is that the coordination of activities becomes a very expensive and time-consuming process that most planning agencies cannot afford. Communication strategies used in planning processes exhibit the same simple to complex range from fliers sent out to announce meetings and public events to more sophisticated techniques involving print and broadcast media. These different levels of communication have the same strengths and weaknesses that the civic engagement processes exhibit. Web 2.0 offers an opportunity to bridge the civic engagement/civic communications gap by simultaneously offering people real-time information, and the opportunity to register their preferences on such broad issues as community vision to a more narrowly focused project decision. Key benefits of Web 2.0 will be its affordability and its ability to reach more individuals than could possibly attend a meeting or read about it in the newspapers.
I was taught that a key purpose of planning was to raise the quality of public debate. That's the way that I have practiced planning, and that's the way that I have seen planning practice become increasingly effective. The focus needs to be primarily on quality and secondarily on quantity. Yes, we need to continue to explore ways in which we can engage citizens on public policy issues. We need more involvemen—broader, continuing involvement. Planners, however, cannot just be meeting facilitators. A planner is always educating and being educated. That's where our new tools, as well as those that are coming, can be incredibly powerful. That's why planners and our colleagues in related design disciplines need to become more engaged in Planning 2.0, from GIS and Web applications to geodesign. Many municipal GIS programs were built through the leadership of a local planner, and initial installations from the 1970s to the 1990s were housed in planning departments. IT departments that ran the mainframe computers wanted little to do with PCs and even less to do with some computerized mapping system, as GIS was often perceived. Unfortunately, as GIS has become mainstream, it is now often back in an IT department, or a finance department, or a public works department. Yes, improved scheduling and responsiveness for fixing potholes is important to both citizens and elected officials, but so is the public dialog that needs to be informed through better and more frequent use of readily available tools. Planning practice is far from perfect, but today, it is the planner that most typically leads local public involvement initiatives and conversations that are important to citizens, elected officials, and their communities' futures. These initiatives are not just occurring in more effective town hall meetings or open houses; they also include Web-based and phone-enabled activities that supplement, but do not replace, face-to-face communications among citizens. But planners, who at their peril, rely only on better town hall meetings will find that communications among citizens and interest groups have already established the frames through which proposals will be seen and evaluated before a town hall meeting can even begin. More communication? Yes. Better communication? Absolutely.
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.
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.
Social media tools and the GeoWeb clearly have the potential to help the public design the communities in which they live. However, these exciting technical advances are not enough. Meaningful citizen participation will also require the development of new tools and modes of professional practice that allow the public to be actively involved in decision making. In the past, planners have generally adopted the client-serving professional role of architect and landscape architect in public-sector planning. On this model of planning for the public, planners use their professional expertise to define goals and identify problems, prepare plans and proposals, and convince public officials and the public to implement their proposals. The role of the public is limited largely to a public hearing conducted at the end of the planning process to hear citizen comments and approve the final plan. This model has been increasingly questioned by private citizens and other stakeholders who are skeptical of claims to professional expertise and demand more meaningful involvement in the decisions that affect them. As a result, planners are adopting new models of planning with the public, which limit the planner’s role in facilitating the decision-making process and providing the information needed for informed decision making. The role of the public is expanded to learning about the past, present, and alternatives for the future and working together to identify and implement feasible solutions. These new models of civic engagement and collaborative decision making require not only appropriate tools but also, more importantly, the skilled leadership of experienced facilitators, carefully designed deliberative procedures, and the active involvement of all affected groups. They are ideals to be pursued that are often difficult to achieve in practice. However, I believe they are essential if new technologies can support truly participatory planning.
I have a working theory that there are five stages of maturity when adopting new technology and methods. The first is fear, in which the new way of thinking is threatening and intimidating to those comfortable and versed in the status quo. Next is denial, in which the new technology is attacked, found to compare unfavorably with current techniques, found to make mistakes, etc. Remember how ridiculed Wikipedia was in the first few years? But after a time denial changes to awe, in which the new thing becomes an object of adoration, is found to be infallible, and is declared a complete replacement for everything that came before. Wikipedia will replace primary sources. TV will replace radio. The iPad will replace TV. Right? But of course the new stuff is not infallible and it doesn't do everything, and once people really start to use the new technology in earnest they reach the stage of frustration. That's because they are engaged enough to be trying to use the new technology, and as they learn what it can do they also learn what it cannot do. So finally they achieve the final stage, partnership, in which they incorporate the new technology into their way of working, using it well but not overusing it, respecting it but not fearing it, taking advantage of the best it has to offer. Where is Planning 2.0 along this scale? I’d be interested in thoughts from readers, but in the spirit of starting the conversation I’ll suggest that planning in America, collectively, is past Stage 2 but hasn't quite made it to Stage 3. Most planners seem to be past the fear stage; we’ve seen enough of Web 2.0 to embrace the concept. I still hear some denial going on, though, usually along the lines that the technology isn’t ready or the public isn't ready. On the other hand there is a lot of excitement about the possibilities, and if we give it another year or so and get some successful, well publicized examples, I bet we'll start to hear a lot of awe in the air. My own perspective is that we have some learning to do. I'm convinced there is great promise for Planning 2.0, and I'm also just as certain there are pitfalls. The best way to find them both is to jump in and give it a try.