Citizens Participation

 GDS LATAM  -  Geodesign  -  Development  -  Sustainability 

Citizen Participation

The Citizen Participation is a System that allows the collaboration of all the actors, including the community, to generate plans that adapt the ordering of the anthropic activities to the capacity and characteristics of the geographical environment that sustains it. A good collaboration and participation mechanism are essential for this purpose. 

The fundamental aspects that characterize Geodesign and Geoplanning are the procedures themselves, through which the planning and building proposals are generated and developed. From this perspective, the processes are the focus of the collaboration and the use of Geodesign synthesizes most of the aspirations of the community that inhabits them.  See how ArcGIS Hub allows you to achieve this goal .

To ensure this purpose, it is necessary to implement a good System of Citizen Participation, which really affects the forms of occupation of the territory. These forms can be undetermined but suggested and materialized in time, in some form that synthesizes all the opinions and audits that were activated during the collaborative process, where all the participants become, in some way, Geodesigners.

During mid-60s at the American Universities discussed that the City as a result of 1000 designers. The need for collaborative tools such as ArcGIS Urban, which is particularly oriented to solve the Smart City Design and Planning challenges. At the regional landscape planning scale it is important to adopt the concept "Designing with Nature" (Ian McHarg, 1970). This involves fundamental transformations in which the "Design Agencies" expand to incorporate new actors and participants, who must be able to manipulate, interpret, oppose or propose alternative spatial scenarios. In this sense, the product (s) of the design processes are also reformulated and reinterpreted to accommodate a new set of values. The intention behind intelligent collaboration is to allow us to accommodate rapidly emerging values, which characterizes our constantly changing societies and environments.

In order to create a good framework for intelligent collaboration, it is necessary to implement two fundamental conditions that must be aligned and that can lead to the necessary coupling between citizens and their geographical environment

First, recognize that there are growing complexities that designers and planners must now face with tools, traditional methods, and ultimately with poor knowledge to generate solid solutions. This awareness comes from a new alignment and emerging design and planning relationships led back to fields such as ecology, geography, energy and phenomena such as the global market economy and climate change. In this sense, the concepts of adaptive management and complex systems are invading the vocabulary of designers and planners, making it necessary to adopt new collaborative methods and tools capable of handling large volumes of data (BIG Data).)

Secondly, recognize that there are demands on Urban Design and Regional Planning because of the changing relationship between governments, the market and civil society, which requires new social and professional processes. To this end, Geodesign for Sustainable Development is proposed as a methodology for developing reconciled solutions, in fact, shifting "inter" and "multidisciplinary" approaches to more democratic and collaborative "transdisciplinarity" approaches. Processes where collaboration from global multilateral organizations to local policy agencies is rapidly institutionalized in 2019. Under this model, transdisciplinary and collaborative", the planning can become more integrated with the research, allowing the challenge of multidimensional sustainability to be understood more rigorously with many disciplines involved, and the public (that is to say, stakeholders, developers, and elected officials) participate in a similar way in the planning and decision making. In short, the designers and planners of the "knowledge base" to be used to develop the proposals have expanded, while the processes to synthesize knowledge —basically efficiency and clarity— have increased in complexity. This happens by incorporating a number of new actors into the design process and space thinking, where the capabilities to synthesize need to be recognized.

Participatory design and planning approaches have considerable advantages over traditional planning. Geodesign practices, by definition, require the participation of a diverse group of citizens and other actors, many with no background or education in design or physical planning. These conditions pose a challenge, but also an opportunity for reconceptualizing the integration of spatial concepts to a wider group of users. In particular, citizens, non-governmental organizations and businesses have become increasingly critical and self-confident to define their needs, ideas and desires, which in turn contributes to the growing complexities of the planning and spatial design, and to the increasing amount of information. that they need to be prosecuted. For this it is necessary to implement a HUB system that allows to connect all the groups interested in influencing the collaborative final product that delimits and considers all the options until satisfying the majority of actors and citizen organizations. The hub of the ArcGIS platform of Esri is proposed as instrumentation of this collaborative procedure.

ArcGIS HUB  (watch video here)  aims to solve the complex problem of collaborative design and planning for the conservation and development of urban and regional landscapes that rapidly change in a trialectical way. Participants may be numerous but are usually added to two groups: (1) stakeholders from the study region called "local experts" and (2) participants from academic, scientific and governmental groups called" non-local experts ". The study captures in real time the digital land-use allocations of each interested party using a framework for the digitisation of direct geospatial scenarios

Once again, the purpose of collaboration and citizen participation in Geodesign and Geoplanification is to accommodate the citizenry to the geographic environment that can support it and not allure it. The mistake we have made as a society is to accommodate the geographical environment to the whims and desires of a good mediated economic return and not to sustainability, resilience and harmony with the long-term environment. The results of this last approach have been devastating, for good urban planning and for good landscaping, and the worst of all is that developments are generated that have nothing to do with what most actors want and above all the citizens.

Prepared by  RICARDO CUBEROS MEJÍA  for GDS Latam Group and Esri Venezuela - 2019 (2021 Update).