Emerging digital plan data – new research perspectives on planning practice and evaluation

ABSTRACT Profound digitalization of public administration is gaining momentum and spatial planning is no exception. To increase the transparency of planning and its usefulness for public and private actors, planning authorities have integrated production and online distribution of digital plan data within existing planning practices and workflows. Many European countries have established public spatial planning databases. Denmark is one of the forerunners in that digitalization. Since 2006, all legal plans are registered in an open geodatabase including over 34,000 currently effective local development plans. Despite the obvious potential of such data to inform about planning practice and associated outcomes, research using these new data is rare, mainly focusing on technical or judicial aspects. Questions related to planning practice, efficiency, evaluation and design have hardly been looked into. In this paper, we provide a short overview of digital plan data in the Danish database as well as similar data in Nordic countries. We then discuss research perspectives regarding plan evaluation and planning practice and we argue that digital plans represent a new transdisciplinary type of intentionally explicit data source for analysis of land change processes.