Exploring Urban Data Visualization and Public Participation in Planning

Abstract

Regulations in urban governance stipulate that large amounts of urban data be made available to the public with the intention of informing and enhancing decision making by businesses and citizens. Yet, the Planning and Building Permit Archive for the City of Oslo as one such source of data, only enables pinhole access by the public, denying public dissemination of planning and urban development issues beyond individual building and planning cases. Based on a set of experiments by the designer Even Westvang in a project called SeePlan, the article discusses how visualizing data from the Planning and Building Permit Archive may extend the available repertoire for the public to participate in urban planning.

Keywords:

• urban data
• planning
• archives
• participation
• visualization

Acknowledgments

This article is a product of the YOUrban (www.yourban.no) research project based at the Centre for Design Research (www.designresearch.no) at the Oslo School of Architecture of Design and was funded by The Research Council of Norway. We wish to thank the Agency for Planning and Building Services in Oslo, which has been consulted during the development of SeePlan and has been briefed on the results of the work.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Peter Hemmersam is an associate professor at the Institute of Urbanism and Landscape at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. He does research within urbanism and urban design and is associated with the YOUrban Project.

Nicole Martin is an architect and PhD fellow at the Institute of Urbanism and Landscape at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and associated with the YOUrban Project.

Even Westvang is a scholar and media designer at Benglar (www.bengler.no) and associated with the YOUrban project.

Jonny Aspen is an associate professor at the Institute of Urbanism and Landscape at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. His main research field is urban theory.

Andrew Morrison is a professor and head of the Centre for Design Research at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. He also leads the YOUrban project.

Notes

1. At the time of writing, public access to the data was limited to “pinhole” targeted queries. Several meetings were held between the agency and the research and design team during the development of SeePlan. Feedback unveiled that the agency found unexpected ways of interfacing the archive material with the public sphere, and map-based access to the database has since been added to the public web page.

2. The SeePlan series can be found here: http://bengler.no/seeplan.

3. Havnespillet.

4. The 1994 California Public Records Act released legislative information online. California Public Records Act, Laws of California (1994).

5. Such as Thomas containing legislative information from the US Library of Congress (http://thomas.loc.gov/home/thomas.php).

6. In Norway, government bodies are required to make information available to businesses and the public (Lov 19. mai 2006 nr 16 om rett til innsyn i dokument i offentleg verksemd, 2006), including the data in the Oslo Planning and Building Archive.

7. E.g., OpenSecrets.org from 1998 and GovTrack.us from 2004.

8. E.g., IBM's Many Eyes (http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/) and Google Fusion Tables (http://www.google.com/drive/start/apps.html#fusiontables).

9. See http://ieeevis.org/.

10. Most cases have unique lot numbers, many of which were geo-referenced using an automated reference to the public interface of the Norwegian Mapping and Cadaster Authority.

11. Inspired by the Chromaroma travel visualization game: http://www.chromaroma.com/

12. In his PhD work on the Tjuvholmen harbor front development area in Oslo, Halvor Weider Ellefsen, at The Institute of Urbanism and Landscape, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, has used DynaPlan as a tool for sketching out timelines of the various actors’ involvement in the development process.