Enhancing citizen engagement in urban planning processes through mobile participation (mParticipation) ; Verbesserung der Bürgerbeteiligung in Stadtplanungsverfahren durch mobile Partizipation (mPartizipation)

The Internet as a low-threshold communication channel provides the possibilities to exchange knowledge, communicate with each other and act outside of the traditional frameworks to nearly everybody around the globe. Therefore, digitalization processes, resulted by diffusion of information and communication technologies, might have massively transformed the contemporary urban settings. The essential elements in this contemporary urban setting are flow of communication and information exchange that are happening through networks. Recently, the widespread of smartphones and tablets with their unique features (e.g. embedded sensors, multi-channel communication, high-speed mobile Internet, intuitive design and portability) have changed the interaction of citizens in and with the urban environment. Furthermore, the new science of cities understands cities as dynamic setting embedded with flows and networks between individual actors and the urban environment, which entails urban planning as a collective process. This indicates that the planning approach has experienced that beside top-down approaches, bottom-up perspective in decision making processes is occurring. Given this fact, today it is no longer the question whether the public should be involved, but rather with which methods a broader spectrum of citizens can cooperate in planning processes. Thus, the participatory methods should be evolved aligned with the new characteristics of the contemporary urban settings and utilize the potentials offered by mobile technologies to enhance the citizen engagement processes in urban planning. Hence, this project’s goal is to investigate a relatively new emerging form of participation as Mobile Participation (mParticipation), which refers to the use of mobile devices (mobile phones, smart phones and tablets) in participation processes. This research, at the first step, endeavors to study the relevance, advantages, disadvantages and specific characteristics of mParticipation. In the next step, the influence of utilizing ...