Abstract
Spatial Citizenship: Online Participation and Co-Designing Environments
Track: Teaching with GIS Across the Curriculum
Authors: Gudrun Wallentin
Regional planning, zoning and development are widely perceived as top-down processes, even when the general public is explicitly invited to participate. Stakeholders often only step forward when fearing 'their backyard' threatened. Only a select few accept responsibility for their community's future. Cloud-based online services now facilitate much more inclusive approaches to public participation. The Austrian 'raum:planen' initiative aims at lowering the hurdle to participation in planning and development processes by enabling online access to relevant planning information for pupils in secondary schools. Without any need for local software installation or data transfers, teachers can introduce zoning and other planning steps by exploring the school's immediate surroundings. Pupils are expected to 'take home' the URL, thus serving as multipliers into the wider public. As interest in planning always is rooted in local, individual concerns, 'spatial citizenship' evolves from bottom-up approaches enabled by geospatial online services.