Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses on challenges of facilitating citizen engagement in participatory urban planning by the means of experimental IT systems. The facilitation is possible but far from easy and simple. The experiences from three different cases are used to illustrate the challenges and problems.

Paper long abstract:

The paper discusses on challenges of facilitating citizen engagement in participatory urban planning by the means of experimental IT systems. The facilitation is possible but far from easy and simple due to a number of issues in different areas and at different levels. Some of the issues are related to different needs and expectations of different stakeholder groups. Other issues are related to the long timescale typical in urban planning projects, and the evolution of such long endeavors. The functionality, robustness, and the need for long support for technology are also an issue, like the fact that each stakeholder group is already living in a digital environment of their own. Finally, there are cultural issues in publishing papers reporting on technologically rather mundane experiments within a publishing culture favoring the use of leading-edge technology. The experiences from three different cases and systems are used to illustrate the challenges and problems. The WebMapMedia is a simple map-based social media to collect location-oriented comments from citizens and used in half a dozen of short experiments around northern Finland. Urban Mediator is a more advanced system that has been evolved in a rather long series of related experiments in Helsinki. Finally Mixed Reality Tent is a technologically high-end movable laboratory for participatory design sessions, developed by a large EU project and experimented with in several European cities.