Exploring regional futures: Lessons from Metropolitan Chicago's online MetroQuest

• Mix of online and in-person engagement reached 20,000 participants.
• Scenario-based participatory visual modeling connects policy choices and outcomes.
• Online and kiosk-based engagement is not a substitute for in-person means.
• Participant diversity requires intensive outreach and demographic tracking.

Online public deliberation on policy and planning issues has great promise as an engaging, affordable and productive public participation method, but it is not a panacea for democratic deliberation or a substitute for face-to-face public engagement. This paper reports on a mix of deliberation tools used by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) to engage residents in online, face-to-face and in-situ deliberations on the long-term future of the Chicago region. MetroQuest is a digital tool for regional planning that served as the primary engine of CMAP's engagement project, contributing new opportunities for individual learning and preference setting that were aggregated into nuanced collective choices. This mix of deliberation approaches resulted in over 20,000 Chicago-area residents engaged, clear public priorities that were reflected in the approved final plan, and advanced a new form of interactive knowledge building and collective priority setting for the field of democratic deliberation. More research is required to develop effective models of engaging the public in a mix of face-to-face and online deliberation.