Different cases of public disagreement in different European countries have shown recently that perusing a thorough planning process is by no means a guarantee for a broad public acceptance of an envisioned urban project. Consequently, the employment of digital media and tools to enable participation of inhabitants in urban planning processes on a massive scale is a promising, but currently not comprehensively analyzed approach. Our research activities are intended to gain an overview on a state of the art of research on communication channels, methods and best practices as well as to identify key challenges and promising strategies and tools to overcome these challenges with specific regards to large numbers of users and digital supported approaches. The latter aspects comprise the investigation of phenomena like participant selection, framing effects and gamified approaches for digital-mediated participatory processes as well as native language processing techniques to examine opinions as well as ideas of relevance from massive public feedback. To examine, we performed literature reviews of several hundred research articles, investigated cases in Germany, France and the Netherlands by interviews and workshops with stakeholders and employed methods of prototyping to conceptualize, develop and assess some promising approaches such as sentiment analysis in detail.

Introduction

Different cases of public disagreement in different European countries have shown recently that perusing a thorough planning process is by no means a guarantee for a broad public acceptance of an envisioned urban project. Currently existing measures to inform the public and collect potential disagreement are based on classical media and require to lookup plans and project descriptions during the opening hours of municipal offices where those materials are at display. As seen for several recent planning cases overrun by public disagreement such as Stuttgart 21 [cf. 1], the 3rd runway of the Heathrow airport [2] or the withdrawn Olympic games application of the city of Hamburg, this procedure becomes outmoded in the digital age. Also, a public debate on urban planning become increasingly confusing in terms of communication channels, principles and opinions [3]. A promising approach to overcome these problems is to actively involve inhabitants in public processes. During the last decades this idea got very popular in order to fertilize acceptance and to reduce scepticism of citizens towards decisions of publically high awareness [eg. 4, 5, 6]. Moreover, public involvement is often seen – but not undoubted – as medium to enhance a quality of decision making in these contexts especially in terms of the provision of lay knowledge and locally adjusted solutions [7, 8]. How to involve inhabitants in urban design planning? According to Bryson [9] a major prerequisite to set up a successful participative process is to carefully assess and design for an intended context and purpose. Most large scale-projects have official project websites and employ social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, and so do initiatives against planning projects [eg. 3]. Consequently, the employment of digital media and tools to enable participation of inhabitants in urban planning processes on a massive scale is a promising, but currently not comprehensively analyzed approach. Since our research will base the development of a digitally enhanced platform for participatory planning support [10], this article is dedicated to gain an overview on (a) a state of the art for communication channels, methods and best practices, (b) key challenges and (c) promising approaches to overcome these challenges with specific regards to digital supported approaches.