Research Paper

ICT enabled participatory urban planning and policy development

The UrbanAPI project Zaheer Khan

Department of Computer Science and Creative Technologies, Faculty of Environment and Science, University of the West of England,

Bristol, UK

David Ludlow Department of Geography and Environmental Management, Faculty of

Environment and Technology, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

Wolfgang Loibl Research Services Energy, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology,

Vienna, Austria, and

Kamran Soomro Department of Computer Science and Creative Technology, Faculty of

Environment and Technology, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

Abstract Purpose – The aim of this paper is to present the effectiveness of participatory information and communication technology (ICT) tools for urban planning, in particular, supporting bottom-up decision-making in urban management and governance. Design/methodology/approach – This work begins with a presentation on the state of the art literature on the existing participatory approaches and their contribution to urban planning and the policymaking process. Furthermore, a case study, namely, the UrbanAPI project, is selected to identify new visualisation and simulation tools applied at different urban scales. These tools are applied in four different European cities – Vienna, Bologna, Vitoria-Gasteiz and Ruse – with the objective to identify the data needs for application development, commonalities in requirements of such participatory tools and their expected impact in policy and decision-making processes. Findings – The case study presents three planning applications: three-dimensional Virtual Reality at neighbourhood scale, Public Motion Explorer at city-wide scale and Urban Growth Simulation at city-region scale. UrbanAPI applications indicate both active and passive participation secured by applying these tools at different urban scales and hence facilitate evidence-based urban planning decision-making. Structured engagement with the city administrations indicates commonalities in user needs and application requirements creating the potential for the development of generic features in these ICT tools which can be applied to many other cities throughout Europe. Originality/value – This paper presents new ICT-enabled participatory urban planning tools at different urban scales to support collaborative decision-making and urban policy development. Various technologies are used for the development of these IT tools and applied to the real environment of four European cities.

Keywords Decision-making, Policymaking, Bottom-up planning, ICT-enabled citizen participation, Urban management and governance

Paper type Research paper

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/1750-6166.htm

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Received 2 September 2013 Revised 29 October 2013

Accepted 19 December 2013

Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy

Vol. 8 No. 2, 2014 pp. 205-229

© Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1750-6166

DOI 10.1108/TG-09-2013-0030

1. Introduction Democracies have been challenged in recent times by increasing demands from citizens to take part in decision-making, for example, infrastructure decisions and planning, especially at local and regional levels (Dahl, 1998; Held, 2006). The political systems of representative democracies have adapted to these challenges by becoming more responsive, opening up to the public in many ways and incorporating more participatory elements. As a result, citizens’ participation in urban planning and policymaking has developed the traditional top-down governance model via promotion of bottom-up approaches to policy development and decision-making, often based on a well-defined eDemocracy framework (Suree and Wichian, 2009). This evolution drives social innovation in support of planning initiatives and results in more public-oriented policy specifications for better governance and sustainable urban environments.

In the above context, the development of ICT tools supporting urban management and governance focuses on information and intelligence needs within a well-defined policy cycle (Khan et al., 2012), consisting of different procedural stages including:

• issue and problem identification; • agenda setting including consideration of alternative development options; • analysis, negotiation and decision-making; and • implementation and finally evaluation as depicted in Figure 1 (Kraemer et al.,

2013; Khan et al., 2012).

In addition, ICT-enabled policy development and decision-making for urban management and governance address the requirements of various stakeholders including citizens, and policymakers at different stages of the policy cycle.

ICT-enabled innovations can enhance public engagement and permit a wider audience to simultaneously contribute to the political debate. This is particularly evident as the convergence of broadband with ICT-enabled innovations (e.g. especially, user-driven applications based on social computing and mobile technologies with 3G/4G services) transforms the way people use the Internet to communicate and interact. Most European citizens embrace “collaborative Internet” and expect to be able to interact with city governments using ICTs (EXPGOV, 2009). ICTs thereby are seen as enablers of more and better participation (e-Participation), democracy (e-Democracy) and more inclusive societies (inclusive e-Governance and e-Inclusion), extending beyond enhanced service delivery, to facilitate interactions between actors. Overall technological opportunity is prompting a transformation of the relations between citizens and government agencies, and, at the same time, the driving forces of ICT-enabled urban management are responding to the dynamics of transformational governance and changes in regulatory, policymaking and governance processes, which is, in part, a consequence of increasing demands from citizens to take part in decision-making.

Critical in the above context is the recognition that investments in ICT-enabled urban management, must be defined by a future vision of ICT-enabled urban management. Investments in a system of governance that is demonstrably failing, particularly in relation to the need for holistic and integrated urban management, will prove both costly and futile. Sound investment can only be made on the basis of user-defined concepts of governance, and associated requirements, that address the failings of the existing

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system and build on a future vision of transformational governance. Future visions of urban planning and ICT-enabled urban governance build upon the analysis of commonality of requirements and a model of a common fully interoperable information space (Høebíček and Pillmann, 2009). In this information space, all agencies, at all levels of governance, and all stakeholders have equal access to information and intelligence necessary to secure the sustainable management of the city-region.

Despite the evident dynamic and optimistic future orientation of all of the above, at the city level, there is as yet only limited evidence of the direct effects of ICT-enabled innovations on city governance systems, and in many respects, this revolution is still in infancy and clearly more research, particularly at the pan-European level, is required to define the most effective tools and methodologies to support ICT-enabled participatory urban governance.

In the above context, this research asserts the hypothesis: ICT-enabled tools can help in transforming urban planning, decision-making and policymaking processes by adopting a bottom-up or a participatory governance model. Consequently, this research aims to answer the following two research questions:

(1) Do ICT tools help in transforming policy-making and decision-making processes? and

(2) Can generic ICT tools be developed and applied in different cities for participatory urban planning, policy-making and decision-making?

Figure 1. Policy cycle – a generic

policy-making model (based on Kraemer et al.,

2013; Khan et al., 2012)

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To address and try to prove or disprove the hypothesis and respond to the above questions, a case study-based approach is adopted. This case study is based on an on-going project, namely, Interactive Analysis, Simulation and Visualisation Tools for Urban Agile Policy Implementation (UrbanAPI) project (UrbanAPI project, 2011-2014)[1] that aims to support the top-down and bottom-up engagements in the decision-making process through provision of selected software tools which collect, generate and combine necessary information at particular stages of the policy cycle to support decision-making. The development of these tools is driven by stakeholder engagement and requirements gathering from four European cities, i.e. Vienna (Austria), Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain), Bologna (Italy) and Ruse (Bulgaria). The enhanced ICT tools (virtual reality, visualisation and simulation) developed by UrbanAPI offer new opportunities for the development of both intelligence sources, as well as tools for decision-making support at three levels of urban governance from neighbourhood to city-wide and city-region levels, thereby addressing the key dimensions of the management of urban complexity.

The conceptual frame for the project is based on the understanding that urban administrations throughout Europe face common challenges in responding to the desire for a more participatory democracy to define the basis for urban economic vitality, social inclusion and environmental sustainability. The commonality of the drivers of urban transition including global economic instability, demographic and migratory evolutions, as well as climate change, offers a major opportunity for the development of common solutions grounded in effective citizen and wider stakeholder engagement in the planning process.

UrbanAPI directly addresses these potentials for the development of common models of policy formulation and implementation in respect of both information generation and management, as well as stakeholder engagement, thereby supporting the potential for widespread application in the cities and regions of Europe.

The structure of this paper as follows: in Section 2, we introduce the background and context of the UrbanAPI case study and its development methodology. Then, comprehensive literature review is presented in Section 3, followed by overall research methodology in Section 4. In Section 5, we briefly present research findings and their analysis and discuss the overall research outcomes. Finally, we present the conclusions in Section 6.

2. The UrbanAPI project as a case study 2.1 Background and context of the UrbanAPI applications Evidence from recent surveys of European city engagement in ICT-enabled urban management and governance and a broader spectrum of smart city-related initiatives demonstrates that with notable exceptions of innovatory progress, currently, there is only limited evidence of the positive impacts of ICT-enabled innovations on urban management and city governance systems (Relhan et al., 2011). It is reasonable to argue that the ICT-driven revolution remains in its infancy, and that progression towards a more mature status, and wider acceptance by European cities, can only benefit from further research to identify a more comprehensive vision of its effective application, particularly where a clear user-defined requirement is established. It is precisely this sort of ambition that is addressed by the UrbanAPI project (2011-2014) as presented in this paper.

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UrbanAPI aims to develop ICT-enabled tools, supporting city governance and adapted governance models, particularly addressing stakeholder engagement and citizen participation in the planning process to enhance sustainable urban policy development and delivery. These tools aim to provide planners and policymakers with the information they need to expose the socioeconomic and environmental impacts associated with alternative options for territorial development, and, at the same time, create conditions in which the political mandate as a critical basis for more effective management is secured (Yigitcanlar et al., 2008). The main stakeholders addressed in the UrbanAPI project relate to three different interest groups:

(1) planning authorities interested in software solutions and application in their cities;

(2) policymakers interested in content communication and means to intervene in the urban development process; and

(3) “ordinary citizens”, laypersons with respect to methodology, but experts in local issue identification and specification of alternative development solutions.

The UrbanAPI toolset aims to provide advanced ICT-based intelligence in relation to three urban planning contexts and spatial scales as depicted in Figure 2. First, UrbanAPI directly addresses the issue of stakeholder engagement and citizen participation in the planning process at the neighbourhood scale by the development of enhanced three-dimensional virtual reality (3DVR) visualisation of neighbourhood development proposals. This 3DVR application enables end-users to access and propose amendments to planning proposals using an interactive visual interface via the web. Second, at the city-wide scale, UrbanAPI develops a public motion explorer (PME) application, a mobile phone location-based application using mobile phone location data that permit the visual representation and analysis of population distribution and movement patterns across the city which assists planning agencies to explore space attractiveness and carry out mobility analysis. Finally, UrbanAPI develops urban growth simulation (UGS) for city-regions, addressing multiple urban planning challenges including visualisation of planning interventions and assessment of the impact of alternative proposals, for urban expansion (and/or shrinkage) in the peri-urban area and the optimum distribution of residential, employment and associated services.

Figure 2. UrbanAPI applications for

specific case study cities at different spatial scales

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The fundamental driving force behind the development of the UrbanAPI ICT toolset was the state-of-the-art literature and the need for ICT innovations in participatory urban planning, policy-making and decision-making. However, these findings were further strengthened by the development of additional user-specific requirements by the public administrations of the case study cities. Most of the cities are participating in up to two different applications that aim to explore the potentials of the applications in relation to context-specific socioeconomic, environmental and territorial characteristics and governance structures and practices, and furthermore to define potential commonalities as a basis for the development of generic ICT applications. Figure 2 also depicts city participation in the different UrbanAPI applications, defined according to local policy priorities.

2.2 Development methodology of UrbanAPI project UrbanAPI adopts the agile system development methodology. This means that multiple application development activities run concurrently and are repeated in multiple cycles (i.e. two cycles for UrbanAPI) to obtain improved results. Figure 3 shows that the overall process is initiated with:

Requirements gathering and stakeholder engagement followed by generic tools development which can be utilised for the development of 3D VR, PME and UGS applications for participating cities. For this tools development activity, SCRUM method (Deemer et al., 2012) is applied.

The assessment of these applications results in the identification of the limitations of these applications and/or gathering new evolving requirements and, subsequently, the entire development process is repeated. One of the major benefits of this agile methodology is regular stakeholder engagement at different stages of the toolset and application

Figure 3. UrbanAPI development methodology

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development process that helps in specifying and validating necessary and common requirements specification, resulting in generic, but nonetheless user – defined, ICT tools.

3. Theoretical background and literature review Cities are transforming and seeking to harness the full benefits of ICT-enabled “urban governance” (Montgomery et al., 2003; Ruble et al., 2001; Eckhardt and Elander, 2011). These benefits are sought to manage the complexity of urban systems in responding to political objectives supporting sustainable urban development, ensuring an appropriate balance of socioeconomic and environmental objectives defined in respect of land-use management and full engagement with urban stakeholder communities in this process (Davies et al., 2012; Alenka, 2011; Hanzl, 2007; Misuraca et al., 2011).

For instance, forms of engagement with stakeholders by the state have evolved from an emphasis on top-down hierarchical models towards networked models, from steering and directing society to contextual steering and incentive provision (Rhodes, 1997, Pierre and Peters, 2000). An important driving force in this transformation concerns the information overload arising from the complexity of urban systems management, experienced in both political and technical management. This has reinforced the understanding that traditional planning methodologies are to some extent outdated, and has highlighted an increasing need for tools to support the involvement of the public in decision-making, and to assist in citizen assessment of the impacts of policymaking, creating enhanced intelligence, applied to both the management of urban complexity as well as enhancement of e-democracy (Felt and Wynne, 2007).

In the above context, the following related dimensions/aspects are covered in the literature review: public participation, urban planning and ICT and urban governance, which collectively support policy development and decision-making processes.

3.1 Public participation Wampler and McNulty (2011) define participatory governance as, “[…] state-sanctioned institutional processes that allow citizens to exercise voice and vote, which then results in the implementation of public policies that produce some sort of changes in citizens’ lives […]”. Other researchers argue that public participation should be seen as a multi-way interaction in which citizens and other stakeholders are formally and informally involved to influence actions in the public arena before a final conclusion is made on the development and implementation of specific policies (Innes and Booher, 2004). In addition, Rowe and Fewer (2005) clearly define key concepts in the domains: public communication, public consultation and public participation, to mitigate misconceptions about public participation. They also provide a comprehensive typology of communication, consultation and engagement mechanisms. Previously Rowe and Fewer (2000) reviewed different public participation methods and proposed an evaluation framework based on acceptance and process criteria. A further important outcome of public participation, as experienced by the authors, is the potential to gather additional ideas by sharing knowledge and enhancing acceptance by the involvement of the local community in decision-making.

Among others, Suree and Wichian (2009) introduced a framework for the development of tools for sustainable eDemocracy which consists of five main components: stakeholder and policy, methodology, ICT, environment and e-Democracy system. They also defined a quality model to develop this eDemocracy framework. Apparently, this framework provides

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useful insights for the development of applications such as eInformation, eService, eVoting, eComplaint and eForum. Such a framework can also be applied for the development of participatory tools for urban planning and management.

3.2 Urban planning Urban planning deals with the design of the built environment from the municipal and metropolitan perspectives. Sustainable urban development can be achieved through the efficient integration of policies for urban planning; land-use planning; transport planning, including transport infrastructure and operations planning; and community development planning, also taking account of environmental and health impacts (UNECE, 2013). Because the goals of urban planning are, by their nature, broad, varied and complex, its delivery is heavily reliant on the action of a plurality of actors across different operationally independent policy sectors (Wong, 2011). Urban planning is a process to develop urban settlements and communities, and it requires comprehensive research and analysis, strategic thinking, knowledge of urban design, public consultation, policy recommendations, implementation and management (Taylor, 2007). Traditional urban planning methods have been greatly transformed by using innovative ICT tools and techniques (Silva, 2010; Yigitcanlar et al., 2008; Kingston, 2007). Furthermore, due to the availability of ICT tools (e.g. GIS, 3D and VR-visualisation tools, Web 2.0/3.0) and vast data resources (e.g. open data initiatives), planners now have more flexibility to perform planning activities and involve different stakeholders, including citizens (Poplin, 2011; Hanzl, 2007), in informed decision-making processes. These issues highlight the need to develop structured mechanisms and processes to effectively use ICT for urban governance and management of cities, as proposed by Khan et al. (2012). In this regard, the UrbanAPI tools and applications help in collecting integrated intelligence for better decision-making in transformational urban planning.

3.3 ICT and urban governance ICT tools and applications have developed rapidly and in a variety of ways including direct democratic experiments such as planning cells, public assessment exercises and moderated discussions of various kinds, as well as experiments with the science/policy interface and impact assessment (Liberatore and Funtowicz, 2003; Boyd and Chan, 2002). Citizens have incorporated a number of roles in these experiments including active and participative, critical in the oversight of politics and administration, productive in generating data useful for assessing public services and efficient in co-producing public services. While this is clearly a demanding set of roles, there is evidence that participatory decision-making in the framework of urban governance initiatives has the potential to widen and deepen democratic decision-making and public service delivery (Wampler and McNulty, 2011). According to some researchers, concepts attributed to “transformational governance” (Jacquier, 2005; 2008; Weerakkody and Dhillon, 2008; Weerakkody et al., 2011; Janssen and Zuiderwiik, 2012) have also emerged in response to the specific demands for the delivery of holistic urban planning to secure sustainable urban development in which partnership is key. This perspective of transformational governance emphasises the essential need for traditional top-down expert-driven and sectorally defined urban planning to be

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combined with bottom-up processes of stakeholder engagement and partnership formation (Albrechts, 2010).

With rapid ICT innovations including Web 2.0/3.0, crowd sourcing, 3D interactive visualisation and simulation for past and future urban growth, ubiquitous access to the web through smart phones, availability of ambient environmental sensors and the Internet of Things and computing and storage capacities using cloud computing, multi-way interaction for participatory governance is further enabled. Many ICT-related planning and analysis tools have been developed helping citizens to understand decisions and the impacts of decisions by providing quantitative and visual outputs for development scenarios, providing access to decision polls or helping to explore citizens’ behaviour to improve urban design and infrastructure (Boyd and Chan, 2002). Similarly, many ICT applications have been developed for participatory urban planning, e.g. mobile phone 3D Augmented Reality application for Vienna (Lang and Sittler, 2012), Turku SoftGIS for Helsinki (Kahila and Kyttä, 2010; Kyttä, 2011) and PME using mobile phone data (i.e. GSM data) for Vienna (Loibl and Peters-Anders, 2012). However, most of existing tools and applications are limited in terms of providing rich and extensive interactive operations (i.e. editing, deleting or modifying scenarios) which can further support public participation in defining future urban models, thus, contributing towards policy development.

Recognizing the potential of ICT tools, local and national governments have started to share public data for transparency and control, citizen participation, development of new innovative products and governmental efficiency (Parycek and Sachs, 2010; Open Government Data, 2012). However, researchers (Janssen and Zuiderwijk, 2012) argue that while open data initiatives from local and national governments share public data, they require further investigation in adopting this data in planning, policymaking and public participation by introducing new mechanisms and transforming current processes. They also indicated that the major focus is on publishing the data, and there are no mechanisms and/or processes for public engagement to capture inputs for planning, policymaking and decision-making. This suggests that city administrations should identify new mechanisms or re-engineer current processes, as suggested by other researchers (Weerakkody et al., 2011) to utilise open data and promote public participation for greater benefits. The UrbanAPI tools and applications utilise data from city databases, as well as open data from various national and European data sources, to better present urban models and secure public engagement.

In addition to the above, ICT applications are being developed to address the central challenges arising from the management of urban complexity (Poplin, 2011; Misuraca et al., 2011). In particular, the interconnected nature of the socioeconomic and environmental drivers of change at the urban level, and their management to secure sustainable urban development, raises multiple challenges concerning communication between collaborating government agencies and concerned stakeholder groups (Relhan et al., 2011; Kearns and Paddison, 2000). For example, Khan et al. (2012) emphasised the need to use innovative ICT tools to support vertical (governance levels) and horizontal (cross-sectoral departments/agencies) integration to facilitate the flow of information to secure intelligence for a variety of applications for urban management and governance. Here bottom-up processes of social networking and crowd sourcing facilitate engagement with urban planning

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structures and decision-making processes. Indeed, social networking and crowd sourcing offer new means of communication and engagement between the multiple and various stakeholders that support the bottom-up processes of sustainable urban governance (Silva, 2010; Jacquier, 2005).

3.4 UrbanAPI tools and applications The UrbanAPI project deals with the challenges described above through city planning scenarios developed at different urban scales and provides further insights in harmonising and integrating data from various sources to promote bottom-up and participatory planning, policy development and decision-making. In this section, we present a review of the literature that is more specific to UrbanAPI applications: 3DVR, PME and UGS.

Using virtual reality applications for urban planning is not a new concept. For example, initial attempts were made in the late 1990s to show the benefits of interactive 3D applications for urban planning and public participation, and since then, many aspects have been investigated (Doyle et al., 1998; Al Kodmany, 2002; Manoharan et al., 2002; Stellingwerff and Kuhk, 2004; Zhang et al., 2007). However, a general issue is always to create interactive 3D worlds (and other information technology [IT] policy support tools) with data collection, feedback and adopted steering mechanisms effectively, i.e. with verifiable impact (Hayek et al., 2010) and efficiently, i.e. with little effort (Hanzl, 2007). Costs were often cited to be high, while the re-usability and maintainability, e.g. with live data, was not evident (Latoschik et al., 2007). The UrbanAPI 3DVR application is built on the basis of the CityServer3D[2] integration service which has already been proven in use by various city administrations, with up to 50 data sources and hundreds of GB of data volume. Upcoming standards such as X3D-Earth (Daly and Brutzman, 2007) permit delivery of portrayed 3D geodata to various clients, ranging from HTML5/WebGL Web Browsers over CAVEs and MultiTouchTables to Smart Phones (Reitz et al., 2009). In X3D, interactivity can be defined and links to arbitrary image or XML data can be included. In this way, live or pre-recorded data from sensors can be integrated or orthoimagery and maps can be obtained from geodata download services. The UrbanAPI 3DVR application uses the open source X3DOM WebGL binding[3] developed by Fraunhofer IGD to exploit the next generation of web browsers as clients. In addition to the above, UrbanAPI provides generic toolsets, e.g. Rule Editor and domain-specific rule language, as current rule-based systems try to solve a wide range of problems, but do not take into account specific issues that arise in the area of GIS. Therefore the UrbanAPI Rule Editor is developed with a new front-end to be used for defining rules in a special language adapted to the problem domain with specific policy modelling examples presented in the study by Kraemer et al. (2013).

Research dealing with communication device location patterns started in mid-2000 (Ahas et al., 2005; Gartner et al., 2007). Current approaches (Jinxing et al., 2009; Michalopoulou et al., 2010) present tests, initial applications and first results. Several projects have been undertaken to locate the population, to examine fluctuations in geographic population distribution and to assess the mobility patterns or via mobile phone distribution in Graz, Amsterdam, Rome and Milano (Ratti et al., 2006), Shenzen, China (Jinxing et al., 2009), and others. All these projects make use of anonymised data

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provided by the mobile communication service providers. UrbanAPI PME application takes a step further based on the following novel investigations:

• residents and visitors distribution, described as volume of mobile devices connected with one cell;

• communication density, by counting the number of active mobile devices per mobile communication cell; and

• population mobility, depicted through tracking of connection handovers or devices between mobile communication cell towers.

For strict privacy reasons, UrbanAPI PME application mainly concentrates on the first issue for mapping activity distribution and activity dynamics to explore the usage (and attractiveness experience) of open space and other pedestrian environments.

In the literature, Cellular Automata concepts have been applied to model urban growth and urban planning, e.g. land-use (Batty, 2007; Liu and Phinn, 2003; Benenson et al., 2004). However, the foundations of UGS applications are based on agent-based models (ABMs) for land-use change simulation which models individual behaviour of actors (residents, developers, entrepreneurs and stakeholders) as agents (or decision-makers), resulting in collective effects on changes in land-use pattern (Loibl et al., 2007; Loibl and Walz, 2010). In UrbanAPI, spatial planning interventions are introduced by allowing end-users to interact with applications via a visual screen and influence the planning choices for the simulation model. Consequently, model recalculation is performed using graphics processing unit (GPU) processing to accelerate the simulation and map visualisation and provide a 3D simulation model.

4. Research methodology Attempting to answer the above research questions, the authors adopt a combination of case study, supported by an extensive literature review, and applied research methods, as depicted in Figure 4. A comprehensive literature review provided the basis for the development of new participatory ICT tools (Section 3). As a result, the case study is based on an EC FP7 UrbanAPI-project – a collaborative research project, in which 11 partners from six European countries are collaborating to develop ICT tools to support policymaking, urban planning and participatory governance at different urban scales. UrbanAPI aims to develop three generic ICT applications (3DVR, PME and UGS) to support urban management by collaborative

Figure 4. Overall research

methodology

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decision-making and public engagement in the planning process. Furthermore, to deliver attributes essential for urban planning decision-making tools in compliance with local city needs, particularly in relation to ensuring effective engagement with stakeholders including citizens (Davies et al., 2012; Poplin, 2011; Hanzl, 2007), urban planners from the project case study cities are actively engaged in project-related research, especially to define city policy-related needs and system requirements and assessment of the overall impact of these tools.

5. Empirical findings, analysis and discussion Collectively, the three UrbanAPI applications aim to provide vital decision-making aids for urban planners in the management of the territory, as well as for associated requirements in political negotiation, and wider stakeholder engagement regarding the future development of the urban region. In doing so, UrbanAPI also aims to support the development of transformational governance, the shift from a purely top-down planning approach to one which is fully engaged with bottom-up initiatives supported by public intervention. Basic snapshots of the web-based visual interfaces of three UrbanAPI applications are depicted in Figure 5. Figure 5(a) depicts diurnal population variation at a specific hour of a selected day. It allows interactive controls to perform various functions such as download results in csv or shape file formats, select a specific cell to visualise where people are coming from or moving to, etc.

Figure 5(b) depicts a snapshot of the web-based visual interface of 3DVR application that allows end-users to perform different functionalities, e.g. aerial/ground navigation; adding/ deleting annotations (shown as purple pillar); or adding new objects, e.g. trees, new buildings, street furniture (blue garbage bin shown in the image). Similarly, Figure 5(c) is a snapshot of the web-based visual interface of the UGS application that allows end-users to navigate through Ruse city-region and see effects of planning interventions.

Major findings of UrbanAPI can be classified into following three main categories: data-specific, process-specific and UrbanAPI tools and application-specific. The first two are more related to issues identified while developing UrbanAPI tools and applications, whereas the third is related to participatory aspects and attractiveness of specific applications for different cities.

5.1 Data specification Data plays a crucial role in the development of UrbanAPI applications. Three main issues require special consideration to deal with application-specific data which can be useful for the development of similar ICT tools and applications:

(1) Application-specific data requirements: Identifying the data requirements at an early stage based on application requirements specification helps in identifying which particular features can be implemented. This also helps in identifying alternate sources of data which can be utilised.

(2) Data availability and accuracy: Collecting the required data is often challenging as storage formats vary from one city database to another, and often there is no metadata available. Furthermore, the required data are not always available. This requires comprehensive data analysis, cleansing, harmonisation and integration so that data can be used for application development. For example, lack of availability of 3D data for 3DVR application requires the construction of new 3D models using two-dimensional city data. Similarly, historical

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socioeconomic and urban development data (e.g. taxation, lot prices, etc) at city-region scale for the development of UGS application are either limited or not available in the required format (e.g. language, resolution, district unit, etc). Additionally, mobile phone data from various providers contain fine-to-coarse grained information and often may not be able to provide required information for PME application for case study cities.

(3) Cost of application-specific data: Not all data are freely available and may only be accessed on payment. For example, mobile phone location data for the PME

Figure 5. UrbanAPI applications:

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application are acquired from mobile data provider companies which often charge for such data.

5.2 Process specific Structured processes need to be applied at various development stages of the UrbanAPI tools and applications due to the complexity of the UrbanAPI applications and involvement of various stakeholders. These processes include:

• Requirements development process: Due to the applied nature of the UrbanAPI project, a rigorous requirements development process is applied that consists of the following activities: • background and context; • requirements workshop; • scenario development and requirements specification; • requirements validation; and • requirements management.

This process and detailed requirements are documented by Khan et al., 2013b, Khan and Ludlow, 2013.

• Data collection process: A structured data collection process ensures that necessary data elements have been collected, analysed and transformed for application development. In the UrbanAPI project, a hybrid data collection process is applied on the basis of identified data requirements using a top-down approach, i.e. using existing application prototypes, and a bottom-up approach, i.e. using cities application feature requirements.

• Software development process: Agile software development process proves to be useful to secure regular stakeholder engagement for feedback on developing application features.

• Evaluation process: A comprehensive user and technical evaluation using criteria, indicators and metrics methodology (Khan et al., 2013a) is applied to secure usability, functionality, benefits, relevance and impact of UrbanAPI applications. The overall evaluation process is documented in detail and accessible from the study by Khan, 2012).

• Stakeholder engagement process: The iterative nature of the software development process necessitates engagement with UrbanAPI stakeholders, mainly city administrations and external bodies, e.g. stakeholder board organisations who are not directly involved in the development of the project but have vested interest in the outcomes and are willing to oversee overall project progress and provide technical inputs. Regular meetings and online feedback mechanisms are utilised to secure feedback from such stakeholders.

5.3 UrbanAPI tools and application-specific Each UrbanAPI application is designed to capture specific aspects related to planning and policy development, providing certain characteristics attractive to different city administrations. Use of specialised software tools as well as skills is applied in the

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development of these applications. We present the strengths and weaknesses found regarding three UrbanAPI applications:

5.3.1 3DVR application. This application helps in presenting urban development plans as realistically as possible with the help of 3D scenarios that support the negotiation process for urban development projects. In addition, interactive control of planning interventions and – on the fly – presentation of the new visual effects created by changes in the urban plans help citizens to understand alternative development proposals. Such 3D visualisation is intuitive and stimulates citizens’ interest in policymaking. UrbanAPI 3DVR applications enable public administrations to virtually represent planning scenarios to policymakers and citizens, inviting feedback by providing 3D navigation through aerial and ground views. Allowing interactive modifications of alternative proposals (e.g. buildings: size, height, shape, surface, location; landscape: adding, removing and changing; underground structures: tunnels, pipes, etc; street furniture: lamps, benches, posts etc; and green infrastructure: trees, etc) helps stakeholders to understand the proposed actions, hence, promoting bottom-up policy development and decision-making. UrbanAPI 3DVR applications provide the capability to process data-rich 3D models imported in different formats including computer aided design (CAD), geographic information system (GIS) databases, selected elevation views and textured information. However, these applications heavily rely on the city-specific 3D data which often do not exist and are expensive to generate.

5.3.2 PME application. This application helps urban planners to acquire information regarding the population mobility patterns associated with various land uses. This information helps planning agencies to manage public and private transportation within the cities according to policy objectives. For example, movement patterns between specific urban districts during specific times (day/night) generate origin – destination matrices. The PME application also helps to observe citizen mobility in relation to all land-use features, for example, open spaces – parks, recreation areas, pedestrian areas and playgrounds. The overall concept of using mobile phone location data to represent spatiotemporal population distribution and motion patterns can be utilised for multiple applications including: environment analysis, e.g. effect of air pollution or noise on the general public, capacity planning of public traffic infrastructure, etc.

The real challenge for the PME application is acquiring mobile phone location data from mobile service providers. The quality and fine granularity of required information within the mobile phone location is not always suitable to analyse and generate useful and complete results. For example, in some small-to-medium size cities like Vitoria-Gasteiz, the distribution of mobile phone cell towers is not dense enough to map the population density patterns, e.g. in 500-m grid cells at a certain time of the day/night.

5.3.3 UGS application. This application can be applied to both city and city-region scales and helps in understanding the large-scale consequences of complex spatial planning decisions including socioeconomic activity in relation to land-use enlargement of the city. For example, in the urban API application in Ruse, the ABM for simulating land use and land-use density change in a 3D and high-resolution cellular landscape (e.g. 100 � 100-m2 grid) permits the allocation of new infrastructure by hand to observe the urban development effects, triggered through planning interventions. In addition, interactive control of proposed planning interventions and associated impacts

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generated by these interventions assists the public to engage in the planning processes and contributes to enhanced planning decisions. Detailed and easily understandable information about planning decisions and full transparency about the expected impacts will support negotiation activities during the public participation process and will so increase public commitment to decisions.

Similar to the PME application, UGS is also highly dependent on the availability of historical data to train agents and predict future behaviour. UGS allows the identification of urban development effects through historical dynamic land-use maps and data and learning about interaction between various variables. It also explores land-use effects of population growth; alternative planning proposals; and planning interventions, e.g. major transport infrastructure. UGS also permits interactive exploration of planning policies and decisions, i.e. what if analysis and the simulation of the overall impacts.

5.4 Analysis and discussion This section critically analyses and discusses the above findings in response to the research questions and hypothesis identified in Section 1. These findings are specified in the following three respects:

(1) UrbanAPI tools and applications supporting various stages of the policy development process;

(2) commonalities in ICT tools requirements based on stakeholder engagement and city scenarios; and

(3) UrbanAPI tools and applications for participatory and evidence-based urban planning.

5.4.1 UrbanAPI tools and applications supporting various stages of policy development process. Figure 1 depicts a generic policy model as a cycle representing different stages of the policy-making process (boxes). The process begins with the “Issue Identification” stage (a.k.a survey) that collects domain-specific data, e.g. socioeconomic and environmental data relevant to the issue of urban development, either by surveys, opinion polls or ICT technologies, e.g. sensor nets, for problem or issue identification. This stage can be seen from a top-down policymaking perspective, e.g. such issues can be either identified from policymakers or planning agencies by initiating a new project in 3DVR application, or from a bottom-up perspective, e.g. by acquiring passive public participation in PME or UGS applications.

The next stage of the policymaking process – “Agenda setting stage” aims to set priorities for the following stages. It is the formulation of a coherent planning strategy, specified by the technical administration experts (urban planners) in respect of a variety of policy objectives that address the issues identified in the first stage, and which proposes a plan of action over a period of time (five to ten-year period) to resolve these problems. Again, all three UrbanAPI applications support this stage by presenting alternative scenarios including proposals and suggestions by participants.

The “Development and analysis stage” utilises data gathered at the “Issue identification” stage and based on the priorities set up in the “Agenda setting stage”, and provides an assessment of the territorial impacts in respect of socioeconomic and environmental variables that identify the problem to be resolved by the plan. In the

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“Negotiation/decision-making stage”, urban planners provide a proposition for future development of the urban territory, universally subject to public and wider stakeholder consultation, following which a political commitment is made by elected officials of the municipality to the implementation of the plan. Implementation of the plan (in the implementation stage) over the plan period of several years involves commitments by a variety of public agencies acting in concert to secure the objectives of the plan to respond to the problems identified at the survey/analysis stages and to provide a framework for private investment in the development of the urban area. Again all three UrbanAPI applications enable passive and active participation in these planning proposals. This also leads to the identification of public preferences and new issues which can be addressed in future planning policy cycles.

The evaluation stage is focused around the monitoring of the implementation of the plan to identify the extent to which the plan is achieving the objectives identified with the policies of the plan, and where it is failing to fully meet the policy objectives of the plan, providing a basis for reformulation of the plan in the next stage of the policy cycle. The process is repeated in a cyclical manner to assess and improve policy implementation.

The above analysis helps in answering the research question: Do ICT tools help in transforming policymaking and decision-making processes?. Based on the UrbanAPI project results, we can conclude that ICT tools do help in transforming policymaking and decision-making processes to a substantial extent by engaging with various stakeholders, including the public at various stages of the policy development cycle, to acquire feedback and influence policy and decision-making. This offers expectation that additional tools can be developed or integrated to fill gaps at other stages of the policymaking process, e.g. social networking, crowd sourcing at “Issues Identification” stage. In addition, an integrated workflow-based approach can assist in more effectively utilising outcomes of previous policy development stages in the next stage as proposed in the study by Kraemer et al. (2013). This would result in semiautomated data collection and analysis for policy and decision-making.

5.4.2 Commonalities in ICT tools requirements based on stakeholder engagement and city scenarios. The starting point for this analysis of commonalities is the understanding that global socioeconomic and environmental forces, the drivers of change, have common impacts on European cities, and indeed on cities worldwide (Lambin et al., 2001; ESPON, 2010; United Nations, 2010). These common drivers of change and their impacts assist in defining political priorities at the local level. These political priorities include mitigation and adaptation responses to climate change, controlling urban sprawl supported by compact city solutions, as well as delivering commitments for urban growth and social cohesion. These common political priorities invite common solutions in urban management delivered by common processes of governance that promote the development of generic ICT applications and methodologies.

The UrbanAPI case study development of detailed requirements specifications for ICT applications (Khan and Ludlow, 2013) mostly derived from cities needs, assisted in analysing and identifying common requirements for the development of generic software features which can be applied in a multitude of cities globally. Clearly, these commonalities help in avoiding the “reinvention of the wheel”.

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In UrbanAPI, Tables I and II represent the total number of scenarios, use cases and requirements defined for the 3DVR and PME applications for each case study city.

Preliminary analysis derived from the UrbanAPI CoReS method application (Khan et al., 2013b) indicates that nearly 50 per cent commonality exists between two or more city requirements for the 3DVR application. These common requirements include usability aspects such as need for visual aid; data synchronisation and integrity; public participation and ease of interaction with the application; accessibility of the application using different platforms, e.g. web and smart phones; change impact assessment; importing new data and exporting results in common formats; and conformance to city administration IT policies.

On the one hand, this suggests, based on the commonalities in city requirements, that generic tools and services can be developed which can be exploited in fulfilling the specific needs of a wide range of city administrations in Europe and globally. On the other hand, requirements individually derived from cities also indicate new potentials which can be developed to enhance functional features and improve the overall functionality of the 3DVR application.

In a similar fashion to the 3DVR application, there exist about 60 per cent commonalities between two or more city requirements for the PME application. These requirements include usability aspects such as need for intuitive user interface; visualisation of aggregated population; indication of places attractive to the public; extrapolation of results to the overall city population; identification of social biasing; visualisation of motion traces between city districts/zones; intra and extra-city origin – destination matrices and travelling mode; accessibility using different platforms; importing new mobile phone data and exporting results in common formats; integration of PME data with data from other sources, e.g. GPS, survey information and city administration IT standards compliance; and workflow documentation.

Based on the above findings, we can respond to the research question: Can generic ICT tools be developed and applied in different cities for participatory urban planning, policymaking and decision-making?. The above analysis for 3DVR and PME

Table I. 3DVR application statistics

Application cities 3DVR application statistics

Number of scenarios Number of use cases Number of requirements

Vienna 2 14 22 Bologna 3 15a 18 Vitoria-Gasteiz 3 11a 18

Note: a There are common use cases between different scenarios of the city application

Table II. PME application statistics

Application cities PME applications statistics

Number of scenarios Number of use cases Number of requirements

Vienna 3 8 22 Bologna 2 7 13 Vitoria-Gasteiz 3 20a 18

Note: a There are common use cases between different scenarios of the city application

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applications strengthens the claim in the research question that generic tools can be developed to a certain extent and to facilitate the development of participatory ICT applications and their wide adoption where more specific requirements from cities add value to these common capabilities.

These answers to the above questions help in proving the hypothesis: ICT-enabled tools can help in transforming urban planning, decision-making and policymaking processes by adopting and supporting bottom-up and participatory governance models, and we conclude that specialised ICT tools and applications help in participatory urban planning, decision-making and policymaking processes and the adoption of bottom-up governance models to a certain extent. The reason is that the development of more integrated tools applied at all policy development stages can be useful in collecting participatory data and performing analysis to support evidence-based decision-making and promote bottom-up policymaking.

5.4.3 UrbanAPI tools for participatory and evidence-based urban planning. UrbanAPI applications support both passive and active participation that help in collecting enough evidence to make bottom-up or democratic planning decisions. The 3DVR application is a typical example of active participatory planning where end-users can participate via web browser (due to X3DOM technology) to identify urban issues for a specific planning proposal, e.g. by adding annotations, placing visual objects at specific locations such as street furniture, new infrastructures/buildings, etc. This application helps city administrations in raising awareness by communicating planning issues to public with the objective to empower them to identify and raise local issues. Likewise, the PME application is an example of passive participatory planning where population distribution and mobility patterns are collected by using mobile phone data and presented through a web-based visual interface. The visualisation results can be exported to other statistical and spatial tools for further analysis and impact assessment. This application provides sufficient evidence to planning agencies in identifying specific areas of a city which need special planning attention. The UGS application supports both active and passive participation. The passive participation is based on the ex-post model calibration by using historical city data to develop behaviour rules and use these rules for ex-ante trend simulations. The active participation element is based on online surveys conducted on the planning interventions, and results are used to calibrate simulation models.

The ambition of the project research is not restricted to that concerning the project cities alone, however, it is evident that the drivers of change influencing the development of European cities have common global and pan-European origin (Kingston, 2007, Relhan et al., 2011). The challenge here could be how to generalise these ICT solutions, which could be adopted by other cities. Based on the UrbanAPI development experience, it is found that the fundamental needs of participatory planning, collaborative decision-making and support to policymaking processes remain the same for different cities. For instance, the UrbanAPI tools can be applied to other cities, as they provide an efficient way to analyse city data and visualise the future city model that helps in securing public support and identify planning issues. Accordingly, lessons learned from the commonalities in requirements, support to participatory planning and policymaking processes and comparative assessment of the applications developed in the differing project case study city contexts, can form the basis for the future development of generic ICT tools that can be utilised in the majority of the � 400

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cities of Europe with populations � 100,000, as well as other smaller cities and towns throughout Europe.

6. Conclusions and future research Urban management is a complex of challenges and provides a suitable and necessary platform for participatory urban planning, policy development and collaborative decision-making by utilising new ICT tools. Innovative ICT solutions offer significant opportunities to ameliorate the substantial challenges arising from this urban complexity. Furthermore, such ICT solutions can be used to support better governance in terms of improved communication and information services, as well as offering the potential to provide policymakers and urban planners with the tools and intelligence needed to actively manage the urban environment. The UrbanAPI case study project presented in this paper demonstrates that different kinds of ICT applications for urban planning and decision-making can be developed and applied at different urban scales to secure collaborative decision-making and policy development. The findings from the UrbanAPI project show that participatory aspects can be active, i.e. 3DVR application, or passive, i.e. PME application, or both, i.e. UGS application, resulting in evidence-based policy development and decision-making. However, such ICT tools are heavily dependent on the availability of application-specific data which often must be acquired from various data sources and hence require data harmonisation and integration.

Furthermore, the real challenge is to attract wider participation from stakeholders and the general public and this varies for different applications of the UrbanAPI project. For example, 3DVR is more attractive to the general public due to its visual intuitiveness and thus supports consultation on urban issues at the neighbourhood scale. In contrast, the PME application uses mobile phone data from a specific mobile data provider which may not present the point of view of the whole city population and hence requires concise statistical manipulation for the extrapolation of mobile phone data to map it to overall city population to make popular planning decisions.

In addition to the above, the UrbanAPI case study reveals that a significant percentage of common application requirements generated by case study cities can provide the basis for the development of generic functionalities in the ICT tools. For example, a preliminary analysis of the UrbanAPI requirements specification of four different European cities indicates that there are � 50 per cent commonalities in policy development and decision-making processes, and hence demand for generic capabilities in the interactive ICT-enabled participatory applications at different governance scales can be useful and applicable to other European cities as well as globally. Many requirements for the development of the urban management system vary between cities, which may be attributed to the local specifics including policy needs and priorities. This challenges the IT community to adopt software design patterns which permit the implementation and integration of the more specific features with the generic software systems. Based on the experiences of the UrbanAPI project, our future research direction aims to develop model-driven approaches by applying design patterns to enable use of existing ICT tools and develop new applications. Furthermore, we aim to investigate and integrate aspects of social networking as crowd sourcing for participatory planning and policymaking.

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Acknowledgement Research presented is carried out within the project “urbanAPI” (interactive analysis, simulation and visualisation tools for Urban Agile Policy Implementation), funded from the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission, call identifier: FP7-ICT-2011-7, under the grant agreement no: 288577, started in October 2011.

Notes 1. The UrbanAPI project is funded under the European Commission’s Framework Programme

7 for three years (September 2011-August 2014). More detailed description of these three levels of applications can be found at: www.urbanapi.eu

2. URL: www.cityserver3d.de/en/

3. Please refer to www.x3dom.org for further information.

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Corresponding author Zaheer Khan can be contacted at: [email protected]

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