Participatory urban planning through online webGIS platform - operations and tools.

This proposal refers to an online webGIS platform of participatory urban planning. It focuses on presenting the aim, the operations, and the tools of the platform, as part of an integrated system, in the context of ppCITY research project. The development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and especially WebGIS tools have lately contributed to public participation processes by enlarging the scale of participation of different stakeholders in urban design. This online platform technically relies on open source, ppGIS application solutions. It combines innovative online tools and supports necessary methodological steps of participatory planning, based on real spatial challenges. The platform encourages setting up projects and sub-projects to comply with the stages of participatory urban planning, harnessing libraries of proposed solutions, and combing user profiling and opinion weighting. The primary purpose of this platform is to highlight the essential features of public space and to organize the steps for equal and meaningful participation of citizens in urban planning. This research in progress visions to create a community of users, experts, designers, and developers around an open source ppWebGIS software.