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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how planning in Switzerland is being reconfigured through digital and increasingly automated infrastructures, focusing on how software environments and emerging AI logics reorganise environmental governance.

Paper long abstract

Urban planning is increasingly conducted through digital geoportals where heterogeneous datasets—zoning regulations, public-law restrictions on landownership, biodiversity indicators, noise exposure, air pollution, light emissions, or heat risks—are layered, queried, and visualised at parcel level. While these infrastructures promise more integrated environmental knowledge, it remains unclear how such datasets actually become relevant for planning decisions.

This paper explores this question through the case of the geoportal ecosystem used in the canton of Zürich. The platform already hosts extensive environmental and biodiversity layers, yet the presence of data does not automatically translate into planning relevance. Environmental datasets often remain contextual information rather than binding considerations in land-use decisions.

To examine this tension, the paper approaches geoportals as boundary infrastructures that coordinate different professional and institutional worlds—planning authorities, GIS specialists, ecologists, data providers, and consulting firms. Rather than simply making knowledge visible, these infrastructures shape how datasets can travel across domains and become admissible within planning procedures. Standards, metadata requirements, validation rules, scale choices, and interface defaults all influence whether environmental data can move from “background layer” to decision-bearing argument.

Empirically, the analysis combines document analysis, platform walkthroughs, and exploratory interviews with planners, GIS specialists, and ecological data experts involved in Zürich’s planning system. The paper traces the moments where environmental information is translated, reformatted, or filtered in order to become actionable within planning processes.

By focusing on these translation sites, the paper asks how digital infrastructures participate in defining what counts as relevant environmental knowledge in contemporary land-use governance.