A Participatory Virtual Studio for Environmental Planning

Abstract

Abstract Public participation is a progress of “consensus building” about particular decision-making. Because of some intrinsic blemish, traditional public participation method always diminishes the range of public involvement. Rapidly growth of the Internet makes it one of the most massing accessed public media. Internet has an additional interactive mechanism rather than traditional public medias. Meanwhile Web GIS has developed into a mature Internet mapping and spatial analysis toolkit. Internet together with Web GIS launch a channel to get mass participation in a spatial referenced decision-making. This paper explores the use of Web GIS and other technologies to overcome the interactive information access barriers to secure a participatory process in the environmental planning. A Web GIS based Virtual Studio system is developed to demonstrate the concept.