Urban Media Trends for Enabling Citizen Participation in Urban Planning: Old Wine in New Barrels?

In recent years, a plethora of new possibilities for interactive urban planning emerged, fuelled by the rise of smart cities. This paper studies the potential of urban media for reshaping the role of citizens in urban planning. Both the historical role that citizens have played in the development of neighbourhoods and the process of urban planning are presented from a literature review. Furthermore, present visions on urban planning and citizen participation in smart cities are reviewed. Lessons learned from this literature study, are confronted with six main trends in urban media from expert interviews. As a result, we deliver an overview that helps urban planners in neighbourhoods in order to profit from advantages of urban media while avoiding their risks. We found that the development of urban media could have both positive and negative effects with regard to citizen participation in urban planning in neighbourhoods.