Volunteered Geographic Information: Potential Implications for Participatory Planning

Abstract

Innovative geovisualization interfaces have created the opportunity for almost anyone with a reliable internet connection to generate and publicize their own maps and geographic information. Such advances have led to what Goodchild (2007) has come to term ‘volunteered geographic information’ (VGI): digital spatial data that are created by individuals who use the tools described above to disseminate their geographic data. Volunteered geographic information are receiving increasing consideration as researchers begin to develop a research agenda for examining their societal significance and authors have made some recent attempts to consider how VGI might facilitate new forms of activism, participatory democracy and neighbourhood empowerment. This paper briefly reviews three interrelated ways in which VGI could be incorporated into planning processes: in terms of creating increasingly open public contributions; its content and characteristics, and the purposes for which these new data sources might be proactively used in a local context.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank two anonymous referees for their constructive comments on previous drafts of this paper.