Public Participation in Urban Planning
The key idea of Playful Public Participation (PPP) is to generate pleasure and joy for the citizens involved in public participatory processes, in particular for the interaction between citizens and planning experts. A broader hypothesis of this research field is that the implementation and further development of the PPP concept will lead to overcoming the issues of rational ignorance and attracting more citizens in participatory activities.
Possible implementations of the concept range from including the activities of drawing and painting, walking and talking, or playing games. We will focus on digital, serious games and open source software which can potentially attract more citizens in participatory planning. The research agenda in this field tries to answer the following questions:
- How to design serious games in which the citizens play and enjoy, learn and participate?
- How to create a PPP environment which induces a pleasure of coming to the planning participatory web space, publishing web blogs about the neighborhood, or chatting with planners and voting?
- How should online game-based applications be designed in order to attract the citizens and involve them in learning about planned alternatives and expressing their opinions?
- What is the role of open source software in designing public participatory games?
The second set of research question is related to ones give above. Here, specific requirements for different scales will be examined. The research will investigate whether there are specific concepts, approaches and/or implementations that are more useful at the regional, urban and neighborhood scales.
Funding: HCU DigitalCity Research Group
Wilhelmsburg am Wasser
Do you walk, run or like having barbecues along the water bodies of Wilhelmsburg? Is it a matter of concern for you to keep on doing these things? Or do you have additional wishes for the recreational use of the water bodies?
These questions are the subject of an online survey that is conducted in July 2010 by the department for computer-based methods for urban and regional planning within the international project Switch. The survey aims at finding out how and where citizens use the water bodies of Wilhelmsburg. The goal is to start a discussion about competing claims among interest groups and to develop a map that brings up this conflict.
