Assessment of Online PPGIS Study Cases in Urban Planning

The paper assesses newest study cases in PPGIS in order to contribute to tools development that would be able to establish more appropriate practices for public participation in urban planning. By adopting previously applied comparison methodology, it assesses the usability, interactivity and functionalities of four selected online PPGIS study cases. It concentrates on online PPGIS assuming that the combination of traditional participatory methods with GIS, ICT, and the interactivity of the Web nowadays, can be of great value to make the participatory debate more democratic and consistent and, eventually, improve the levels of public participation in urban planning, strengthening the role of citizens in decision making. However, the assessment shows that online PPGIS applications are, in some aspects, limited. It is still an open question how online PPGIS should be built to face the difficulties of traditional methods and provide the proposed benefits.