Assessing impacts of PPGIS on urban land use planning: evidence from Finland and Poland

ABSTRACT

Knowledge on when, where and how Public Participation Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS) influence planning decisions has been spotty and incomplete. To fill the gap, we assessed the influence of public land use preferences, obtained through PPGIS, on selected land use planning cases in Finland and Poland. The selected cases ranged in scale from a neighbourhood to an entire city and involved two types of online PPGIS tools: an interactive map-based questionnaire and a map-based discussion platform. The assessment was based on a qualitative framework organizing potential drivers of the planning process into convening, process and outcome aspects. The assessments results show high number and diversity of participants, the use of PPGIS in the beginning of the planning process, and the quality of PPGIS data representing public land use preferences may influence the content of planning documents. Conversely, a mismatch between plan scope and citizen concerns, legal framework constraints, lack of coordination between overlapping participatory and decision-making processes, and low representativeness of PPGIS data diminish the influence of PPGIS on planning decisions.

KEYWORDS:

• PPGIS
• public participation
• land use planning
• SoftGIS
• geo-questionnaire

Acknowledgements

This study was partially supported by a grant from the National Centre for Research and Development (Narodowe Centrum Badań i Rozwoju) in Poland; the funding decision PBS3/A9/39/2015. Support for the study also came through a project ‘Collaborative remedies for fragmented societies – Facilitating the collaborative turn in the environmental decision-making (CORE)’, funded by the Academy of Finland’s Strategic Research Council. In both cases, the support is gratefully acknowledged. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the help of Cezary Brudka, Edyta Bąkowska-Waldmann, and Marek Młodkowski with conducting the interviews in Polish Cases.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Narodowe Centrum Badań i Rozwoju [grant number PBS3/A9/39/2015]; Strategic Research Council, the Academy of Finland [grant number 313014].