How can urban planners use technology to communicate more effectively with stakeholders?

1 Benefits of technology

Technology can offer many advantages for urban planning communication, such as improving access and participation, enhancing transparency and accountability, and fostering collaboration and innovation. For instance, online surveys, social media platforms, mobile apps, and interactive maps can allow stakeholders to share their opinions, preferences, and experiences. Additionally, dashboards, infographics, animations, and simulations can visualize complex data and scenarios to make them more understandable for stakeholders. Moreover, technology enables urban planners to monitor progress and outcomes of their plans while facilitating collaboration with other stakeholders. Online platforms, forums, wikis, and crowdsourcing can enable urban planners to exchange ideas, information, and resources with other professionals and innovators. Lastly, technology can involve stakeholders in the design and implementation of urban projects.

2 Challenges of technology

However, technology also poses some challenges for urban planning communication. These include creating digital divides, reducing the quality and depth of engagement, and increasing complexity and uncertainty. For example, some stakeholders may not have the necessary access, skills, or trust in technology to engage in meaningful dialogue. Online tools may also limit the scope or diversity of stakeholder feedback, while technical glitches or security breaches can create further complications. Furthermore, some online tools may produce overwhelming data or information with unintended consequences for urban planning decisions. In this way, technology can create inequalities and exclusions among stakeholders, as well as compromise the quality and depth of communication.

3 Tips and tools

Urban planners need to follow some best practices and use effective tools to maximize the benefits of technology for urban planning communication. Assessing the needs and preferences of stakeholders is key, as well as understanding their characteristics, expectations, and capacities. Balancing online and offline communication should be considered, as well as choosing and using online tools wisely. Examples of such tools include SurveyMonkey, Facebook, ArcGIS, Miro, and Kumu. These tools can be used to create surveys, manage social media pages, create interactive maps, collaborate on whiteboards, and visualize relationships among stakeholders. By doing so, urban planners can tailor their communication strategies and tools to their stakeholders' needs, collect feedback and input from them on their communication preferences and satisfaction, facilitate dialogue and consensus-building, enhance communication quality and depth, validate and enrich online communication, create secure environments for data storage and access, and improve their cloud security posture.

4 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?