Employing mobile media technologies as a participatory planning tool in the suburban housing estate

As a response to the NSSB 2013 conference call ‘Suburbs-transformation and development”, we want to look at new methods for creating citizen participation in urban development processes by drawing on practical experiences gathered through a collaborative planning project between researchers at Aalborg University, Denmark, an urban consultancy firm, and city planners in Vollsmose, Odense, Denmark in 2011-12. In this particular context, the practical challenge was to develop new facets to a master planning process at the Vollsmose housing estate, located in the outskirts of Odense. By evolving an on-going process, informed by mobile citizen generated information loops (open-source), the aim was to move beyond the master plan as a detached expert-driven product and towards an instant master planning process. In order to explore this iterative take on the planning process the research team and consulting firm employed mobile media technologies as a tool for creating new forms of citizen engagement. Based on the lessons learned from the research and development project we conclude by looking at what mobile media technologies afforded this planning process and what these experiences might add to a participatory planning process in more general terms.