Designing Mobile Applications for Citizen Participation in Urban Planning

Abstract

As a result of the increasing requirements for urban planning, a paradigm shift towards citizen participation has evolved to collaboratively address enhancing urban challenges and social conflicts. Past projects have examined urban citizen participation processes and methods to support citizen participation. However, the challenges in the domain of informing, encouraging, and enabling participation at any time are not sufficiently examined and less attention was devoted to urban participation through mobile applications, even if required devices are widely used and can enable permanent communication channels between citizens and planning authorities. Therefore, a design science research project was initiated to examine how to design mobile applications to support citizen participation in urban planning projects. In this paper, the findings of the first cycle are presented including issues, meta-requirements, design principles, the development of a mock-up, and its evaluation to provide insight into the design of mobile applications for citizen participation.