Spaces for Public Participation: valuing the cross-border landscape in North West Ireland

Landscape is no respecter of territorial or administrative borders and is a highly pertinent policy-praxis arena within which cross-border cooperation can progress. Although a supportive soft policy space for cooperation on landscape exists on the island of Ireland through the European Landscape Convention (ELC) and the key bilateral spatial planning framework, two interrelated imperatives have not featured substantively on cross-border agendas: engendering active public involvement in landscape management, and harnessing digital technology as a means of enabling such participation. Thus, this paper elaborates upon the findings of #MyValuedPlaces, an online map-based pilot survey aimed at capturing the perceptual values attributed by the public to the places special to them in the cross-border cultural landscape of North West Ireland. Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) offers one accessible method of engaging with the multiple, subjective understandings of landscape, including in the Irish Border region. To this end, the methodology and potential uses of the place-based data generated by the #MyValuedPlaces survey are discussed, including challenges encountered with survey completion. The article concludes with critical reflections on how such ‘soft’ approaches to public participation in the cross-border landscape on the island of Ireland can be mobilised better in future, particularly through embedding them within official public consultation processes.