For years, practicing planners have been seeking substantive input from urban residents on their plans for new roads, rail systems, housing developments, and shopping centers. Having abandoned a “build now, ask questions later” mode of practice, we now seek input from affected residents because the result is a better city.  The primary modes of citizen input include public comment periods at government meetings (e.g., planning commissions and city councils), and charrettes, where planners present mockups of the proposed changes and solicit feedback.  However, these fall far short of what we might call “democratic planning” because they do not reach all or even most people affected by the proposals and often fail to offer a realistic vision of what will be built.  To address these shortcomings,  planners need to look outside of our profession for better models, working from inspiration in technology and the humanities to build realistic, democratic, participatory plans that everyone can see and to which all can contribute.

Planners have tried promising experiments to move beyond the typical models for citizen input.  Participatory Chinatown, a project of Hub2, uses 3-D visualization to model potential changes to the built environment of Boston’s Chinatown, inviting residents to immerse themselves more fully in the future form of their neighborhood and provide comments on what they see.  For folks not conversant in Second Life or computers in general, local teenagers serve as guides to the technology.  Betaville, an open-source platform for partcipatory urban planning where users can submit their own designs for remaking city spaces, is another.   These tools have the potential to blow open the planning process and make it radically participatory, even democratic.

I am seeking ideas you can contribute to the practice of planning for substantive citizen input.  When a resident steps before his or her city council to speak about a development, the time is minimal and the council may or may not be attentive; when a charrette is held in a neighborhood about to undergo physical changes, planners usually fail to consider neighborhood context.  We usually begin with the assumption that anyone who wants to will speak their mind through these avenues; with demagogues taking up much of the allotted time and the inability of some folks to attend these events, it is unlikely that everyone who wants to comment actually does, or even that those who do are fully informed of what is changing.

Therefore, I propose that “substantive citizen input” depends upon 1) information about what is to change that is as complete and comprehensive as possible, including well-developed plans from planners and developers, 2) a decentralized process that does not necessarily depend on getting to City Hall or the community center at a certain time and day in order to provide input, and 3) someone on the other end that listens to and incorporates public feedback into the given plan.  In my experience, #3 depends on the planner(s) involved to take their role seriously and value public input.  However, I think we can enhance #1 and #2 through new tools and processes, like those described above.  These will then pave the way for democratic, participatory planning.

Why am I presenting this to you, an audience of digital humanists, when I work in the very social science-y field of urban planning?  The field of planning does not incorporate participation by many people very well into practice, even though it is necessary and valuable.  Because we strive to use our knowledge in the service of society, we must do better.  I am here to mine the knowledge of digital humanists—an interdisciplinary group innovating with technology and studying people at the same time—to find useful additions to the planner’s toolbox.