An Assessment of Online PPGIS Case Studies in Urban Planning Geisa Bugs - Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul

Cities, Technologies and Planning – CTP 12
2012 International Conference on Computational Science and its Applications
Salvador, Brazil

Assessment of Online PPGIS Study
Cases in Urban Planning

Geisa Bugs
geisabugs@gmail.com

UFRGS – Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil
PROPUR – Post Graduation Program in Urban and Regional Planning

Introduction
Public Participation Geographic Information Systems – PPGIS
• Applications designed to exploit the potential of GIS to promote community goals,
connecting the technical capacity of GIS to local knowledge.
• Rather than using GIS resources in a traditional way, as in spatial analysis, they are
used for production of maps and stories that help to characterize the local space.
• The goal is not to turn participation into GIS, but to present and organize relevant
information that would not become visible through other methods.
• The Internet is the dominant platform.
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Web
Web PPGIS
GIS PPGIS

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Assessment of Online PPGIS Study Cases in Urban Planning | Geisa Bugs | ICCSA 12 | CTP 12 | Salvador 2

Introduction
Online PPGIS
• Freedom to explore the question and create solutions that represent public
perception.
• Explore information, test possible solutions, see and compare ideas, and share
visions.
• Easiness to identify points of interest that connect the mind map with the system
map by exploring different types of media such as photos, videos, and 3D models.
• Potential to improve public participation into decision making.
• Bottom-up initiatives are already emerging on Internet.
• But, in general, public institutions have failed to incorporate the technologies.
• There are not many experiences taking place focusing on urban planning,
implemented.


Introduction
Public Participation
• A decision making process open to citizens, involving issues that directly or
indirectly affect their lives in the use and ownership of a specific urban territory.
• Important planning component that leads to different solutions than otherwise,
once the citizens know the reality and local problems better than anyone else, and
can provide detailed insights that are not normally available from other sources.
Urban Planning
• Deals with problems of the built, natural,
and social environments.
• A wide range of factors have to be
balanced.
• Public participation is only one of the
factors involved.
• Complex decision making process, there is
an infinite number of possible solutions.


Introduction
E-planning and e-participation
• Online information technologies are becoming essential tools, a new threshold for
urban planning operation.
• Enhances understanding and communication of actions and policies, trough
consultation of legislation, plans, projects, surveys, discussion rooms, and online
voting on proposals.
• Includes multimedia communication resources (images and virtual reality) to an
efficient representation of planning information to society.
• Provides continuous public access on the records of the evolution and adoption of
proposals and policies.
• There is no restriction to geographic location or time, so more people can
participate.
• Could also overcome the atmosphere of confrontation and avoid the domination
of the process by individuals whose views do not necessarily represent the
majority.


Introduction
Needs
• More inclusive forms of participation in urban planning;
• Information system provided by the authorities accessible to all;
• Assess if the technological advances will promote the improvements suggested;
• Lack of documental research on how users are making use of online PPGIS;
• More studies investigating how Web GIS could be a PPGIS component.
In order to
• Contribute to the development of tools able to establish more appropriate
participation channels.
• Find indications on how PPGIS could be developed to face open questions:
– Which GIS tools and interaction levels are adequate?
– How to balance complex tolls and usability?
By
• Assessing study cases, applying a previously developed methodology (Steinmann
et al, 2004).

Study Cases
Selection
• Link accessible and operational at the time of the survey.
• Project published in the last years and quoted by other research on the topic.
• Have been evaluated or tested by real users.
• Designed for some kind of planning decision making.
4 study cases
• ParticipatoryGIS, 2010, University of Western Ontario, Canada;
• SoftGIS, 2004, Aalto University, Finland;
• Participatory Geographic Information Systems for Transportation – PGIST, 2007,
University of Washington, USA.
• Canela PPGIS, 2009, University Jaume I, Spain.

• Study cases can be helpful to develop general statements about a given situation.


Study Cases
ParticipatoryGIS
• Collaborative Web GIS developed into 2 parts: MCDA (analytical) and
argumentation maps (deliberative).
• The goal was to bridge the gap between experts and the public.
• Sets the best location for building a new parking in Canmore, combining each
individual judgment with the group preferences.
• There are four sites options. By clicking on each alternative a window displays its
properties.
• Users define how many suitability
criterion must be satisfied to the site be
considered, and enter preferences on
the relative importance of each (none,
low, medium…).
• Users can see their individual map with
the final classification of each alternative
location and also the collective results.


Study Cases
SoftGIS
• Tool for assessing environmental quality. It collects resident’s perceptions
systematically, questioning experiences and everyday behavior within the cities.
• Forms a special GI database to be used in planning. Environment quality approach
based on the residents challenges the traditional top-bottom practices.
• Users follows a step by step, filling up a
questionnaire about appearance, functionality, and
social life of daily places.
• First version was tested in the city of Järvenpää, in
2004, but subsequent work has made applications
in other situations, as for example on how to
evaluate children’s mobility.
• Its differential is to be a permanent tool for public
opinion collection, so it is not a decision support
system.


Study Cases
Participatory Geographic Information Systems for Transportation - PGIST
• Research generated the Internet GIS-based tool “Lets Improve Transportation”.
• It generate ideas, synthesize, and reach a decision on the best-case scenario, by
exploiting various activities: i) receive information on projects, learning about
proposals, ii) categorize and prioritize ideas, considering potential impacts of these
changes on communities, iii) determine which projects should be supported by
working in collaboration with other residents.
• The study took 4 weeks, at Puget Sound region, in 2007.
• The task was to determine which transportation
improvement projects should be constructed and what
funding mechanisms should be used.
• The end result contains 27 projects with total cost of
11.8 billion U.S. dollars, approved by 61% of the
participants.


Study Cases
• Canela PPGIS
• Takes advantage of the collaborative Web 2.0 aspects.
• Users can view spatial data organized by urban planning topics (housing,
equipment…), post comments georeferenced to the object of interest (schools,
streets…), classify the comment (hint, complaint…), and see all contributions
posted.
• The system stores all comments in a
database that may assist spatial
analysis that reveal patterns/trends.
• Comments are saved along with its
"context" (coordinates, zoom level,
layers on…), which allows the specialist
to get a understanding on the “users
emotions”.
• Used only on a one week workshop in
Canela, Brazil, on January 2009.


Criteria
Interactivity refers to the user interaction with the
application. 4 stages:
• Information delivery: bottom stage, passive participation,
delivery
one-way flow of information, from the system to the
user.
• Online discussion: two-way flow of information, since it
includes discussion between participants, or participants
and planning authorities, for example.
• Map-based discussion: communication is on the basis of
an online map, through graphical expressions or
comments on specific map objects. Participants can
submit to the authorities their personal maps, but are not
actively involved in decision making, since do not receive
feedback.
• Involvement in decision making: highest stage, when
participants contribute actively to the decision making.


Criteria
Functionality: the following functionalities are common in most GIS:
• Topological overlay: different layers can be combined in a customized map.
• Information retrieval: user may retrieve attribute data describing characteristics
about a selected object with a mouse click on a spatial element.
• Query: user can retrieve the data according to the related terms, phrases or
features chosen.
• Data selection: user can select spatial objects on the specified thematic data layer.
• Zoom and Pan: enable the users to change their view and the level of detail by
clicking on a location or by dragging a box to define a particular extent.
• Distance measure: enables the user to measure the distance between two
locations or the total distance of a route, with multiple stops, for example.


Criteria
Usability
• Part of the Human Computer Interaction discipline.
• Refer to evaluating whether an application works and has met its design goals
according to the user’s needs.
• Usability testing with real users involves watching target users or existing users of
a system interact with it by performing a set of real or representative tasks.
• The analysis of the extent to which a computer technology supports users to
achieve specific objectives in an effective, efficient and satisfactory way.


Assessment
• Currently, PPGIS projects uses little GIS functionalities: none of them make
available query or data selection, for instance.
• The two-way communication is not fully established.
• The two applications with involvement in decision making are more complex,
which consequently compromises its usability by lay people. Finding this balance is
a challenge to be overcome.


Assessment
ParticipatoryGIS
• Interactivity: high stage, the participants contribute to the decision making.
Although the intermediate steps are not guaranteed. The online discussion tool
was not used by most users, indicating that the two parts, deliberative and MCDA
analysis, are not totally integrated, prioritizing the multicriteria evaluation map.
• Functionality: zoom, pan and information retrieval, which is restricted to the land
location suitability.
• Usability: the subsequent usability test concluded that this depends significantly
on the previous participants experiences with GIS and Web. Probably because the
multicriteria concepts turn it into a tool designed to an audience with some basic
statistics understanding.


Assessment
SoftGIS
• Interactivity: communication is primarily one-way, but not as often occurs from
the system to the user, but as a questionnaire answered from the user to the
system. So, the user communicates on a map-base, however, unilaterally.
Discussions among participants do not occur.
• Functionality: zoom, pan and information retrieval.
• Usability: at the end of the questionnaire, the respondents gave feedback about
the research and the application. In general, it was positively evaluated, although
some considerable number reported “basic” difficulties about the use of the map
tool, or find the map hard to orientate.


Assessment
PGIST
• Interactivity: highest stage, participants contribute to the decision making.
Provision of information occurs in both directions and discussion among
participants is made possible through the forums. However, it is not a map-based
discussion. The map serves only as a means of information communication that
subsidize the participation.
• Functionality: zoom, pan and information retrieval.
• Usability: by enabling detailed analysis of alternative scenarios and aiming to
prioritize proposals, it is a tool that requires a long time dedication to be used
correctly, even though the authors advocate that the site is designed to properly
orient any citizen interested in the process.


Assessment
Canela PPGIS
• Interactivity: archives the third stage, communication on the basis of an online
map, through comments on specific objects of the selected map. But participants
were not actively involved in decision making on processes that include the return
of their participation, mainly because it was not implemented.
• Functionality: zoom, pan, information retrieval and topological overlay.
• Usability: evaluated as satisfactory during a one week usability test developed in
2009 with local stakeholders.


Final Considerations
• Internet and GIS tools encompasses new methodological possibilities for
participatory urban planning, increasing opportunities.
• But online PPGIS are also unilateral in some ways.
• The decision making level is not always reached.
• It's not an easy goal, there are many weaknesses in the participatory process that
persist on the virtual.
• Need to improve the processes so that it’s worth the public effort to take part.
• New empirical experiences could shows to each extend the contributions collected
can intervene in urban planning decisions for real.
• It is about understanding that the technologies are available, must be assimilated
by both experts and no experts, and, especially, about how to do it properly.


Cities, Technologies and Planning – CTP 12
2012 International Conference on Computational Science and its Applications
Salvador, Brazil

Thank you!

Geisa Bugs
geisabugs@gmail.com

UFRGS – Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil
PROPUR – Post Graduation Program in Urban and Regional Planning

An Assessment of Online PPGIS Case Studies in Urban Planning Geisa Bugs - Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul

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