Information technology as a tool for public participation in urban planning: a review of experiments and potentials

Information technology offers new potentials of citizen participation in urban planning. The essential tasks to achieve with the use of new media are: providing a communication platform which suppresses a barrier of non-professionalism, allowing for distant contacts and enabling participatory process management. The paper contains a review of experiments and prototypes of different IT applications: Participatory Planning GIS, 3D models, communication platforms and computer games. Technology facilitates also collaborative distant work and citizens' participation in the city database completion. The most cited examples remain experimental. Great potential lies in augmented reality technology, which is currently being tested.