541 / 2019-02-28 20:53:59

Evaluation of Mobile-based Public Participation in China’s Urban Planning – A Case Study of PinStreet Program

Mobile-based Public Participation,Evaluation Framework,PinStreet,Urban Planning,China

全体主题 > Public Participation Systems

In recent years, mobile-based participation has been introduced to China’s urban planning practices with the emerging of information technology. However, there are limited discussion tackling how to assess public participation, let along mobile-based ones. Based on traditional effective public participation framework and internet product operation strategy framework, this paper proposes an evaluation framework, tailored for mobile-based public participation in a new-media era. To represent the close-loop logic of internet products, this framework includes six specific quantified indicators from three aspects, namely involvement, trust and empowerment. Taking PinStreet, a mobile-based participation program in China as a case study, this paper evaluates the effectiveness of nine practices for different clients and a range of different scenarios, regions and scopes. The evaluation result shows that the effectiveness of mobile-based public participation is closely related to the application scenarios. Taking the communication advantage of new media, participatory programs largely raise the involvement level by getting promotion in various channels. Upon involvement with target groups, participation behavior is built on trust, determined by match degree of topics, location of sites and credibility of the executive party. Further, high level of empowerment is achieved with the engagement of long-term inhabitants, intact mechanism with valid feedback and chances of implementation, as well as clients’ direct administrative power over the target site. In the end, this paper gives several recommendations to optimize the mobile-based participation in China.