The relevance of geovisualization in Citizen Participation processes

Abstract

Citizen participation (CP) aims to reinforce citizens' involvement in decision-making processes concerning significant choices that will affect their communities. As information and communication technologies have been gradually adopted in CP processes, CP evolved to become e-participation. Among technologies that are relevant to citizen participation, [2] note that visualization tools are the key to effective participatory processes. In this paper we offer a better understanding of how geovisualization could enhance citizen participation, thanks to its potential to offer several benefits for a CP process in its different steps. The major contributions of this research are: (1) we outline the main steps of citizens in participatory processes based on a literature review; (2) we demonstrate how geovisualization has the potential to represent citizens' living context through spatial, temporal and semantic dimensions. Thus, we offer a better understanding of geovisualization benefits for citizens in each step of the participatory processes. Eventually, the findings of this paper will be further tested through the implementation of a prototype participatory approach.