GIS-based visualisation of development proposals: reactions from planning and related professionals

Public participation has been recognised as a desirable element of the planning process, but traditional consultation and communication methods have not always been able to engage a sufficiently broad cross-section of the public to be truly representative. One factor behind this is the relative complexity of much of the information used in the planning process, and the difficulty of presenting it to a lay audience. Visual communication is a well-established way of trying to overcome this barrier, and while computer visualisation, particularly that based on GIS databases, is a fast-emerging part of that field, relatively little research has been done to investigate how an audience might relate to such images, and what factors might influence them. The research behind this paper attempts to identify the most important issues regarding the use of such visualisations with the public, using a set of visualisations for a real project in Norwich, UK, with a series of interviews with planners and other related professionals.