Public Digital Collaboration in Planning

Abstract

It is becoming increasingly important to European democratic governments to increase public participation. One of the areas that gives rise to significant public dissatisfaction and feelings of dis-empowerment is that of environmental planning. Environmental planning is a diverse, complex and difficult process requiring consideration of wide ranging issues that include: urban function and form; cost and benefit; appearance and experience; and allocation and provision. The process is costly and so at any late stage difficult to deflect. This is not assisted by complex and even conflicting interpretations of the legislation. With broadening web access government bodies at various levels (national, regional, and city) are now turning their attention to web based approaches to easing access and empowering public involvement and debate on the issues. It is argued that replication on the web of existing plan and cartographic-based approaches to planning will tend to perpetuate the requirement for trained interpretation, thereby excluding the general public. More effective tools are required for collaborative citizen based examination and development of alternative proposals. This paper describes the basis for the coming three years of research in the Virtual Environmental Planning System (VEPS) project. VEPS proposes a new open standard web approach to enable citizens to view, analyse, interact with and respond to proposed changes, to collaborate and comment together and pose and test their own alternative solutions. This approach it is argued needs to be based on an interactive threedimensional virtual reality visualisation that allows the viewer to experience the highly complex information without need for training, ‘because they can see and experience what the visual impacts of the planned development will be and can see the environmental impact in the associated model’.