ICT enabled participatory urban planning and policy development: The UrbanAPI project

摘要

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to present the effectiveness of participatory ICT tools for urban planning, in particular supporting bottom up decision making in urban management and governance. udDesign/methodology/approach – This work begins with a presentation on the state of the art literature on the existing participatory approaches and their contribution to urban planning and the policy making process. Furthermore, a case study – namely the UrbanAPI project is selected to identify new visualisation and simulation tools applied at different urban scales. These tools are applied in four different European cities – Vienna, Bologna, Vitoria-Gasteiz and Ruse - with the objective to identify the data needs for application development, commonalities in requirements of such participatory tools, and their expected impact in policy and decision making processes. udFindings – The case study presents three planning applications i) 3D Virtual Reality at neighbourhood scale, ii) Public Motion Explorer at city wide scale, and iii) Urban Growth Simulation at city-region scale. These applications are dependent on specialized city data to develop the required features and often this data is not available in the required quality and so necessitates data harmonisation and pre-processing. In addition, UrbanAPI applications indicate both active and passive participation secured by applying these tools at different urban scales and hence facilitate evidence based urban planning decision making. In addition, structured engagement with the city administrations indicates commonalities in user needs and application requirements creating the potential for the development of generic features in these ICT tools which can be applied to many other cities throughout Europe. udResearch limitations/implications – Top-down and bottom-up urban planning and policy making needs vary from one city administration to another. This makes it difficult to capture and develop all the required features in the respective IT tools, and this often results in failure of developing generic software solutions. Therefore, the benefit of identifying commonalities among city requirements for IT tools can result in the development of common features and secure huge savings compared with investments in bespoke/ad hoc software development. The UrbanAPI application development follows a structured requirements development methodology where over 50% of commonalities are identified at various stages of a policy making cycle/process. However, specialised data is required for the development of these applications which often does not exist in the required quality and format and hence necessitates data harmonisation and pre-processing to ensure successful delivery of these tools. udOriginality/value – This paper presents new ICT enabled participatory urban planning tools at different urban scales to support collaborative decision making and urban policy development. Various technologies are used for the development of these IT tools and applied to the real environment of four European cities.