I’m extremely happy to announce that we have a new paper published in Cities and it’s about citizen participation tools.

But, you may think, there are already so many papers on tools?!

Indeed!

So in this paper, that resulted from an inspiring and rewarding collaboration, we propose the EmpowerCycle, a framework that helps us understand the roles that tools play in urban planning. From the perspective of the citizens, and from an empowerment perspective. What is unique is that we combine and integrate the knowledge from urban planning, empowerment in human-computer interaction, and citizen participation.

From the abstract: We considered a wide range of digital participation tools, from tools designed for research projects to commercial and open-source tools. Our results show that there are two levels of ‘‘power mediation’’ and their ‘‘mediating actors’’ in digital participatory planning: (1) the digital tool and the HCI designer who creates the tool, and (2) the planning cycle and the planner who defines the participatory process. We furthermore highlight the importance of embedding participation tools in complementarity with each other to empower citizens at different levels. Taking these two insights into account, we developed an integrated framework – the EmpowerCycle – to embed digital participation tools in planning processes for citizen empowerment. The framework addresses the disconnection between digital tools and planning practice, supporting both researchers and practitioners in the design and implementation of digital participation tools in planning practice and decision-making processes.

Read the paper here.