Urban Planning 2.0

Abstract

This article addresses the challenges to urban planning, which is a social activity that affects the development of urban communities and helps them to cope with the challenges posed by the global-local and real-virtual dialectic. The approach to planning is influenced by an emerging creativity and knowledge-sharing culture that has an inherent connection to global and digital transformations. Such a transformation is giving urban planning a new look, which is depicted in the concept of Urban Planning 2.0. In this article this paradigm shift is explained and illustrated with a special view to identifying the ways Web 2.0 tools can be utilised in urban planning. The fundamental question emerging in the critical evaluation of Urban Planning 2.0 is how citizen-oriented practices of Planning 2.0 relate to formal decision-making within the representative system of government and professionally and technocratically oriented planning practices of city governments. There is some evidence to suggest that the new Web 2.0 tools make the difference in open, inclusive and creative contexts, where their optimal deployment requires a paradigm shift in urban governance and planning.