Experimental Web Program for Promoting Residents' Participation on Urban Master Planning

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

I participated in making the Urban Master Plan for Kushiro City in order to make residents par ticipate in the web model. I joined the project in the latter half of its conception, so my main work was simply to offer informative ideas to residents by means of the city web. There are three points which have to be considered : (1) Paying attention to the residents who's level of knowledge and awareness is low in regard to the Master Plan. (2) The Master Plan plays a bridging role between the city administration and its residents. (3) It was found that the amount of access from the residents was lower than expected ; therefore, it was necessary to do more aggressive campaigning to the public. It was evaluated in regard to the user-friendliness of the website, but the problem was a low level of participation from the local residents. Keeping the above points in mind, I tried an experimental, virtual city plan using the internet with the residents who applied from an announcement for Kushiro City. The experiment involved three groups, the residents, the city administration and the NPO. We tried to include the usage of internet from the early stages of the planning and to increase the amount of residents' participation in the planning. We also included an improved method of planning using the internet. We attempted to identify the findings of some local problems and made a plan for the discussion of each city district using electrical real time conferencing. The experiment was done only using the internet, not by the usual face-to-face conference room style. It was found that using the internet was a better planning method and the identification of local problems was highly efective. However, in regard to the discussion we found that an actual workshop was necessary along with the net communication. We also found that it was more effective to specify a certain time duration for the discussion of the conference.