| dc.description.abstract | Public participation is of importance in local government, particularly in the decision-making process of spatial planning projects. In recent decades, Planning Support Systems, such as Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) have been introduced to help increase public participation in de planning process. However, these participation tools have mostly been used by municipalities to inform citizens rather than to gain knowledge and ideas from each other. Moreover, public participation and its tools have not always been evaluated positively. To increase levels and quality of citizen participation, the added value of participation tools should be identified and lower thresholds should be realized to enable citizens to communicate and participate more directly and more meaningfully. Tools such as Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) and 3D geo-information are therefore of interest to be used in an online Public Participation GIS environment. In this online environment, ways are provided to enable citizens to easily give ideas or opinions on plans. Furthermore, neighborhoods are visualized in 3D to create better understanding of the proposed plans, improving communication and participation. Tests are done for the City of Rotterdam in two case study areas; ‘de Zenostraat’ and ‘het Noordelijk Niertje Oost’ (NNO). The amount of respondents for these case studies is very small, respectively 11 and 14 citizens. Therefore it must be noted that due to this small N, conclusions must be taken with care. Furthermore, the NNO project showed a mismatch in desires for public participation, which resulted in less responses and lower attitude results. Via an online questionnaire based on Likert type and scale data, the potential added value of the online PPGIS environment is compared to that of public hearings. Indicators used to analyze this added value are based on recent work of Peter Pelzer (2015). Results show that respondents are overall slightly more positive about the public hearing as a method alone, though it was indicated that the real added value can be found in combining the two participation methods in a complementary fashion. Furthermore, the applied indicators for added value (utility, usability and usefulness) were found to have no complete coverage of the respondents’ attitudes toward participation methods. Therefore, additional indicators are proposed for the future study of public participation methods in the decision-making process of spatial planning projects. These are focused on (1) tuning desires of municipality and citizens, in order to prevent such mismatches; i.e. the before-design study, and on (2) gaining trust of citizens towards the proposed online PPGIS method, by proving that citizens’ opinions will be used in the decision-making process; i.e. the after-application study. | |
