Interactive Immersive Public Displays as Facilitators for Deeper Participation in Urban Planning

ABSTRACT

Citizen participation is an important part of urban planning but few people participate, and most frequently they can do so only passively. This can result in excluding many people and to urban designs not reflecting people’s wishes. In this paper, we explore the use of interactive, immersive public displays as facilitators for deeper participation in urban planning. We propose a novel approach that combines panoramic videos of locations with overlays depicting planned buildings. We evaluated it in a lab-based user study (N = 21), where participants used a simple mobile client for interacting with a prototypical implementation to vote/comment on urban planning proposals. Usefulness, ease of use, ease of learning and user satisfaction were all rated highly by the participants. The pros and cons of the approach were further identified based on the analysis of the interview data. Overall, the results provide initial evidence that the approach succeeded in facilitating deeper participation.

Statement of Previous Research

We, Guiying Du, Christian Kray, and Auriol Degbelo, confirm that this work is original and not under review or consideration for publication in another journal.

Notes

1. https://sustainingcommunity.wordpress.com/2017/02/14/spectrum-of-public-participation/(last accessed: August 28, 2018).

2. https://www.opengovpartnership.org/(last accessed: January 15, 2019).

3. https://www.opengovpartnership.org/ogp-participation-co-creation-standards (last accessed: January 18, 2019).

4. Though the report of (Arbter et al., 2007) is focused on the Austrian context, quotes from their work are still used here because they apply to the German context as well.

5. https://github.com/sitcomlab/IVE.

6. https://angularjs.org/(last accessed: January 18, 2019).

7. https://socket.io/(last accessed: January 18, 2019).

8. https://neo4j.com/(last accessed: January 18, 2019).

9. https://threejs.org/(last accessed: January 18, 2019).

10. https://sitcomlab.github.io/IVE/intro/.

11. All models and videos for the six urban planning scenarios can be obtained upon request to the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union through the GEO-C project [H2020-MSCA-ITN2014] (http://www.geo-c.eu/) under Grant number [642332].

Notes on contributors

Guiying Du

Guiying Du is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster, Germany. Her research focuses on the potential of public displays for public participation in urban planning. She is also interested in gestural/mobile interaction with immersive video environments.

Christian Kray

Christian Kray is a professor in Geoinformatics at the Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi), Münster university, where he heads the situated computing and interaction lab. His research interests include how people interact with spatial information, how to design and evaluate location-based services, and how to make smart cities accessible to all.

Auriol Degbelo

Auriol Degbelo is postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster, Germany. His current research interests include semantic integration of geospatial information, re-use of open government data, and interaction with geographic information.