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Top1. Introduction
The integration of citizens within urban planning processes has been a hot topic in the planning theory discourse, starting with the birth of Jacobs’ democratic urban planning (Jacobs 1961). Ever since then, several tools and methodologies to achieve proper citizen engagement have been tested, all of which serve the fundamental principle that cities are made for citizens and thus citizens should have a say in how they are planned. That discussion between top-down large-scale strategic planning developments and empowered citizen action, started by Jacobs at the end of the 1950s, is still ongoing. Citizen participation is currently an approach successfully integrated within the planning processes of many cities, and an extensive body of literature emphasises its benefits (López Baeza, J., Noennig, J. R., Weber, V., et al 2020; Hälker, N., Hovy, K., & Ziemer, G. 2018; Lazzarini 2016). More specifically, recent studies focus mainly on two strains: either communicative methods as a way to increase the quality of participation, or digital participation procedures facilitated by technological development. This paper sets out to expand on the link between both, and to analyse the key aspects of participation using an applied example: an integrated e-participation system deployed in the city of Hamburg, Germany. The Digital Participation System (DIPAS, www.hamburg.de/dipas/) is the resulting product of a long series of participation projects carried out in the Free and Hanseatic city of Hamburg. DIPAS was implemented as a cooperation project lead by the Hamburg Authority of Urban Development and Housing (BSW) in cooperation with the Agency for Geospatial Data and Surveying (LGV) and the CityScienceLab of HafenCity University (HCU). The research and development project had the objective of developing, testing and implementing a digital workshop tool that would be used in physical participation workshops while intersecting with an existing online participation platform. 1 In this cooperation, HCU takes the role of performing scientific accompanying research, among other tasks – from which the present paper results.
The research presented first localises the topic within the participation and collaborative planning discourse, and introduces the case study of the Digital Participation System in Hamburg. Following this contextualisation, data collected in interviews and usability studies is evaluated and analysed through procedures following Fung’s (2006) approach, the Democracy Cube. This section elevates the evaluation of participation from a two-dimensional assessment as it has been laid out by the fundamental ladder of participation concept (Arnstein 1969), towards a three-dimensional evaluation focusing on the selection of participants, the modes of communication and decision making and the extent of authority and power. By introducing the Participation Cube, a tool for visual analysis is used to help evaluate participation procedures. After that, the implications for the embedding of a DIPAS within procedural planning systems are discussed.