Cities for Citizens

by Alice Dietrich on Unsplash

Identification of Socio-Spatial Value Conflicts in Urban Planning

In the path to more inclusive and sustainable cities, our research aims to identify pluralistic public values and their conflicts in urban space using natural language processing, explanatory spatial analysis and expert workshops.

Urban planning practice is both explicitly and implicitly shaped by value judgements of public officials and planners. As a means to lead to inclusive and sustainable outcomes for citizens in cities, this study is aimed at identifying the social and spatial conflicts emergening from identification of public values in participatory urban planning. We do this by leveraging data originating from the citizenry itself. A mixed methods approach combining a quantitative case study of digital citizen contributions in Hamburg, Germany and expert workshops with stakeholders from the municipality illustrates the spatial distribution of value conflicts inherent to sustainability and livability.

A map of Hamburg, Germany showing showing socio-spatial conflicts measured from input of citizens.
A map of Hamburg, Germany showing showing socio-spatial conflicts measured from input of citizens.

Key Objectives

  • Connect value theory to participatory urban planning
  • Investigate the means to leverage natural language processing for the analysis of citizen contributions collected with public participation GIS (PPGIS) platforms
  • Knowledge utilisation through expert workshops with planning professionals
Rico Herzog
Rico Herzog
Master Student of Engineering and Policy Analysis

Master student with an interest in the combination of spatial planning and digitalization.