Digital Participatory Planning

Citizen Engagement, Democracy, and Design

Alexander Wilson, Mark Tewdwr-Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000436617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

Digital Participatory Planning outlines developments in the field of digital planning and designs and trials a range of technologies, from the use of apps and digital gaming through to social media, to examine how accessible and effective these new methods are. It critically discusses urban planning, democracy, and computing technology literature, and sets out case studies on design and deployment. It assesses whether digital technology offers an opportunity for the public to engage with urban change, to enhance public understanding and the quality of citizen participation, and to improve the proactive possibilities of urban planning more generally. The authors present an exciting alternative story of citizen engagement in urban planning through the reimagination of participation that will be of interest to students, researchers, and professionals engaged with a digital future for people and planning.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003190639-1

The way people communicate has fundamentally changed and is in a constant state of reinvention and reinterpretation. As the world designs and embraces new technologies, new ways of doing things open up. It has always been this way. Just as the telegram allowed global asynchronous communication for the first time after the 1840s, so will future technologies such as 5G broadband create transformative impacts on the way we communicate. Each time there is technological advancement, it changes the way humans are able to interact with each other in distinct places and spaces. Communication over time becomes faster, deeper and – compared to previous eras – much more diverse. And every time there is transformation in the way we behave and act, it has significant implications for people and planning.

Communications that once used to take weeks – on risky voyages across oceans and seas – now take milliseconds, between places anywhere on the globe. An agreed set of standards – Morse code or, more lately, the internet –has changed understandings of space, and how, as a society, we exist together. With the development of these technologies, people (at least those fortunate enough to have an internet connection) can instantaneously communicate with others, thereby making distance invisible. Each century has brought a seismic shift in the method, speed, distance, and amount of information that can be communicated. This has implications for both how spaces are used and understood, but also how we communicate with each other.

Early on it was thought that these technologies would make place irrelevant, where "what once had to happen in the city can now take place anywhere" (Pascal, 1987: 597). In fact, as Graham (1998) argues, and as it has been borne out through time, the intertwinement of urban spaces, the "vanishing city" (Pascal, 1987), and digital technologies is much more complex and nuanced. This book sets out the story of how the digital world is transforming our lives, the nature of government and the forms of democracy, and the increased use, sophistication and influence digital technologies have on our experiences and discussion of places. All these changes impact on how we shape change in place and space, manage conflicting expectations within cities, and give people and communities a chance to provide their own inputs into designing future places. That activity we call urban planning.

Planning has been around, at least in its modern guise, tor about 120 years (Hall and Tewdwr-Jones, 2020). It is rightly regarded as a feature of modernity, a governmental process seeking to manage externalities of how we live today while creating the means to look forward positively into, and prepare for, the not-too-distant future. Planning has undergone significant change as a political, governmental and professional process over time and has also been impacted by the technological and digital revolution. But what has been missing to date has been a detailed analysis of how the digital turn is reshaping both urban planning and wider society's interaction with planning issues. Our hunch, upon commencing this research, was that the digital transformation of how people understand, interact and communicate change in the built environment seemed to be passing urban planning by. It was as if planners saw the digital revolution as something that was outside planning, or even outside their remit, a matter for other forms of professional and leisure activity, rather than an innovative way that planning as a governmental and largely democratic activity could transform for the better. As others have pointed out, if planners do not engage with these technologies, others will (Williamson and Parolin, 2012), with planning having a less important and significant role in future place-making over time (Hollander et al., 2020).

Public involvement in local decision-making has been a feature of governmental processes in Western democracies for more than 50 years (Wilson and Game, 2011). It is, in fact, a diverse set of enabling mechanisms that cover both representative styles of government and participatory styles of government. Public involvement takes the form of direct elections and ballot box votes, held at periodic times to elect politicians and officials to established offices of state for set periods of time. Or it can occur through specific sectoral and policy opportunities where the public, broadly defined, are part of a set consultation process, where government is seeking the views or reactions of citizens to a new proposal, plan, strategy, or even development. These forms of involvement, elections and consultations, are a feature of representative democracies (Morison, 2017).

Since the 1990s, public involvement in the affairs of local government has also seen the rise of more direct forms of democracy, with enhancement of participatory opportunities (Buček and Smith, 2000). The extent of participatory democracy or, for some, "deliberative democracy" (Fishkin, 2011), is dependent on a range of circumstances, including styles of government, opportunities for open democratic debate, the specific issues under consideration, and the involvement of third parties. The reasons for the rise of participatory democracy may correspond to the view that it allows for direct voices in discussion with government, or that it may reach sections of the electorate who might otherwise not become involved in consultation processes. A further feature is that the participatory exercise may include boarder and more open-ended issues rather than government seeking responses to a pre-determined issue with a restrictive number of possible options.

Participatory democracy is not necessarily an alternative to or replacement of representative democracy. We still exercise the right to vote for local politicians every few years, and those politicians are elected on a manifesto that sets out commitments to policy change and service delivery over the following period. We hand responsibility and trust to our elected politicians to represent our interests and take action on our behalf. We still have the right to be consulted on matters from time to time, whether that's in relation to economic development, housing, transport or other activities. Sometimes, and only in certain countries, this also involves the opportunity to cast your vote in referendums on set propositions. All of these options are part of representative democracy. And a hallmark of urban planning is that it has built-in consultation mechanisms into set governmental processes that allow for citizen involvement in both plan-making activities and in the determination of development proposals. Enhancing more participatory democratic involvement in planning matters has, however, been somewhat more challenging (Tewdwr-Jones and Thomas, 1998; Thomas, 1996).

This book considers these three interrelated components: the rise and use of digital technology, particularly by society; the ways urban planning is changing governmentally and democratically; and the changing nature of local citizen engagement in issues concerning the future of places. Before we start our discussion of these issues, we need to set out some definitions, since public participation, engagement and digital planning are each large subjects in themselves:

Public participation: We define this as interaction between the public and government that involves collaboration, citizen empowerment, involvement, and purposeful activity. In the text, we interchange this phrase with "citizen participation". We make a differentiation here between public participation and public consultation, seeing the latter as principally an activity of government or any other agency that seeks to inform or consult and is initiated and led by officials or politicians for a set purpose of that agency.

Engagement: We define this as an overarching term to cover the principle of getting involved in the interests and activities of government and external organisations, communities, and citizens, and proactively seeking respectful areas of dialogue and cooperation mutually and meaningfully. The word refers to the action of seeking the best means for all those involved, and can also cover an array of methods utilised for such action.

Digital planning: We define this as the design, deployment, and adoption of technology to provide innovative ways that assist professional planners, elected politicians, businesses, community groups, and citizens: to understand changes in urban and rural areas; to help communicate change to all those interested in their places past, present, and future; and to undertake pilot activities to support better understanding and involvement in planning decision-making.

We do not equate digital planning directly to the ongoing smart cities debate per se, but see it as something distinctive and more open. While smart city literature is beginning to engage with the wider consequences of the introduction of digital technologies in the built environment, the focus of this book is on citizens, rather than infrastructure, to engage people in place-making.

We begin the discussion by considering how the digital world has developed, what consequences it has brought for society and our lives, and how technology has created a step-change in expectations for both democratic involvement in government and in urban planning.

Society and the Digital World

Humankind's relationship to technology can be characterised as a story of wonderment and fear. We marvel at the possibility of more advanced machines that are capable of producing intricate designs, high-speed calculations, and ultra-complex computation. But, as humans, we are also conscious of both creating advanced forms of technology that might one day outstrip our control and knowledge, and of setting in train a technological process that will hurtle society into some unknown abyss from which it will be difficult to escape.

Successive portrayals of technology in literature, film, and television, from the rise of machines and the dawn of computers, to the development of cyborgs and creation of artificial intelligence, have all toyed with the idea that, at some unknown future point, technology may "take over". It is a feature of humankind that we enjoy reading and watching these dystopian provocations, safe in the knowledge that they could never really happen ... could they? Tantalised by science, and happy to embrace and consume new technology when it is produced for the mass market, we are equally frustrated with the degree to which it can, unconsciously, take over our lives. How many of us have vowed to have a break from social media platforms, or limit the amount of screen time we have with technological tools, or remind ourselves that there is a real world life beyond computer gaming? And how many of us are drawn back to these technological drugs after a short break away from them?

There have even been, somewhat ironically, television series in recent times that have tested whether families can live without their technology and how long for. There is a serious side to this too: studies have shown that too much screen time might have a detrimental impact on our health, wellbeing, and even sanity (Kitchin and Fraser, 2020; Makin, 2018). There are also those in society who are only too ready to believe in conspiracy theories that technology and telecommunication devices interfere with their brains. They see telecommunication as part of some heinous grand plan by multinational corporations, foreign states, communists, or extra-terrestrial bodies to corrupt us and take over the world. In some nations, even those considered advanced such as the UK or USA, people have attacked mobile phone masts and 5G antennae for these reasons, concerned about the degree to which telecommunications track every aspect of our lives; in some cases, there is even a belief that digital technology is being used to spread the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21 (Meese et al., 2020).

In the global COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy theorists, so-called "anti-vaxxers", have refused to accept the vaccination, suggesting that Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, has created a tracking device that will be implanted into the vaccine. A report by the Centre for Counteracting Digital Hate showed that 31 million people across the globe belonged to anti-vaccine groups on Facebook, a figure that is equally alarming and concerning, given the amount of revenue that such groups can make from the online advertising space provided by social media companies (Burki, 2020). The fact that all these conspiracy theorists are using that same technology to further their false beliefs, and that they do not see the irony of this, would be amusing if they were not so serious and steadfast.

Not so long ago, such conspiracies about technology were the stuff of science fiction. We recall the villainous, super-rich industrialist and philanthropist Ross Webster in the 1983 critically-slated film Superman III, played by Robert Vaughn, who remarks, "Computers rule the world today. And the fellow that can fool the computers, can rule the world himself". Little did we realise then, that in the not-so-distant future, an elected President of the United States would use a social media platform, Twitter, to inform his 88m followers – falsely – that that the 2020 democratic election was rigged and fraudulent, and use digital platforms to incite violence on the streets and adopt racist language.

Similarly, the US presidential election of 2016 gave rise to another phenomenon, so-called "fake news". Popularised by Donald Trump on his social media accounts, "fake news" as a phrase was used to refer to news that is perceived to be fake and disseminated digitally. Its authenticity is dubious, and it has been shown to be a rhetorical device (Gelfert, 2018). This is not the place to go into detail about the merits or otherwise of the use of the fake news phraseology, other than to note how it has been perpetuated through digital form, and how we might discern its authenticity when used by opponents deliberately to challenge democratic decision-making or even factual matters. Questions arise as to whether digital social media should be monitored and false statements called out.

That digital technology has been used for political ends, or used by some people to grand-stand their extreme views, the so-called dark side of the web, is perhaps not that surprising. Scientific and engineering innovations that were once intended for strategic military and research use have now been commodified and marketed for personal consumers. Very few parameters were put into place by the hardware and software designers to restrict the ways technology could be used or restrict the content it contains; this was quite deliberate, and underlay a somewhat naive assumption that knowledge-creation, education and communication would be the driving forces for its practical applicability. It should be remembered that, for a great many people in society, the use of digital technology as a fact-finding, intercommunication and fun device is still the overriding reason of having a smartphone or a personal computer or tablet in the first place (ONS, 2020a). And it has transformed positively the lives of the people that own them, in ways that would have been unforeseeable even in the 1980s. Not all users of technology are digital sociopaths.

Science and technology in all their forms have become embedded in our lives and in our homes in such an indecorous way, that it is easy to forget how things used to be before we had that technology. It was a simpler age, reliant on manual activities, achieved through at pace activities, and certainly with less-intensive use of domestic energy. The real technology, and we are talking here of the days before personal computers and hand-held devices, was thought of as what only boffins did, those people in white coats employed in secret government laboratories and in big shiny glass corporate headquarters that most people only interacted with through another longstanding technological device, the cinematic screen. Now, individuals are consumers of these digital technologies, able to do so much digitally that benefits our home and professional lives.

A wander down a street in any urban area will reveal that digital transformation. Places may appear largely as they did a couple of decades ago, but now you will start to notice the number of people holding, looking at or speaking into hand-held devices. We now communicate with friends wirelessly as we walk down the road, share digital videos or pictures of ourselves and our interests while out and out, use Bluetooth devices to chat hands-free while on any form of transportation, we may listen to music on AirPods, check the latest weather reports on our watch and instruct our devices to play a song from a library of over sixty million pieces of music, as wireless networks (even "smart" bins) attempt to track our movements (Shubber, 2013), and as we send messages and transfer files to work colleagues over email from verbal instruction while away from our desks and laptops. But there are also a number of changes that are hidden from view, the implications of which cannot be understated: the largest accommodation provider in the world owns no property (Shabrina et al., 2021); "the world's largest taxi firm does not own a single vehicle, or employ a single driver" (Knight, 2016, n.p.); the largest movie house owns no cinemas (Szalai, 2020); the second largest retailer has no storefronts (Felix, 2020); music is now streamed, leading to the collapse of physical music sales¹ (Savage, 2019). Current processes, both within central and local government for managing these trends, are failing to keep pace with these changes.

For those who work in professional employment (beyond essential in-situ manual, healthcare, and hospitality sector jobs), we can now practically work anywhere we wish to, outside our formal places of work. That can be good – it should, i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 An Historical Review of Citizen Involvement in Planning
• 3 Citizens and Planning
• 4 Human-Computer Interaction, Planning and Participation
• 5 Digital and Participatory Design
• 6 Citizen Uses of Social Media
• 7 Participation through App Development
• 8 Digital Gaming as Inclusive Participation
• 9 Responsive Digital Engagement
• 10 Effective Citizen Participation
• References
• Index