This past summer offered me the most relaxing break, but it also brought some truly exciting milestones. In mid-July, my first article, co-authored with our WP3 team and Saana Rossi from Aalto University, was published. My summer got even more thrilling as I had the honor of presenting the study at the PLANNORD 2024 conference in Reykjavik in August.
Although the successfulness of public participation projects has been studied from many different perspectives, there is a lack of knowledge of how participation influences the planning outcomes. Through the interview study of nine Finnish urban planning projects, we studied how the use of a digital public participation GIS (PPGIS) tool has influenced the outcomes of urban planning.
In the selected cases the information collected with a PPGIS tool has been highly valued by the planners, leading to concretely influential participation in 6 out of 9 cases. In these cases, the planners gave concrete examples of how the information had influenced the created plan or draft. We created a model that describes how the information produced by participants is traveling from the participants to the outcome of the planning process. With this model, the main factors limiting the degree of influence were recognized. We also suggest actions that could increase the influence of participation on the planning case level, as well as provide long-term benefits for the whole planning organization.
Among other findings, we saw that digital participation methods can increase the influence of participation by bridging the gap between the planners and the residents. However, for this to be optimally achieved, the new digital participation methods should act as complementary, rather than compensatory to the traditional participation methods.
I’m now happy to share that our paper was recently peer-reviewed and published in the journal Computers, Environment and Urban Systems. The paper is part of a special issue on Digital Planning for Sustainable Urban Futures: Scientific insights for technology application in planning practice. This publication is a particularly exciting milestone for me, as it marks the first article of my PhD journey. The paper is available as open access, and you can read it via this [link].
Furthermore, at the end of August, I attended the PLANNORD 2024 conference and got the possibility to present our just-published study. This year the biannual conference took place in the scenic city of Reykjavik, Iceland. The atmosphere of the conference was very warm and inspiring. There were numerous interesting topics centering around planning and sustainability, as well as some interesting events, as we witnessed also the eruption of a volcano (which luckily did not cause any trouble for us).
I made some new connections with other researchers in the field. I had also the possibility to explore the otherworldly nature of Iceland and make some unforgettable memories. The conference provided thought-provoking discussions about the future. For me, the main takeaway was the call for courage and leadership, which is needed in our pursuit of a sustainable future.
– Valtteri Nurminen, PhD Researcher from WP3
