Abstract proposal for 2018 IGU Urban Commission Meeting Montreal – 12 th -17 th August 2018 2018 IGU Urban Commission Annual Meeting Urban Challenges in a complex World - Key factors for urban growth and decline AUTHORS: Stéphanie HASLER, Jérôme CHENAL, Marc SOUTTER Data, Technology and e-Participation: New Challenges for Urban Planning 1. Theoretical background and research questions Over the last decade, the development of technology has completely transformed the urban living environment: video conferences and emails generated new means of working (e.g. home office), online stores saw the rise of new means of shopping, and smartphones promoted new modes of transportation (eg. Uber). Urban management has improved through massive use of technology and data to optimize flows and resources (eg. dynamic taxes, automatized traffic lights, smart waste management), and generated the smart city model. In the field of urban planning, the advent of technology has facilitated the process, by simplifying exchanges and data processing, while reducing costs and saving time. However, processes have not really evolved, even though the concept behind smart cities precisely calls for smart planning. Technology and urban data offer great potential to transform the urban planning system and adapt it to forthcoming issues [1,2]. Similar to the radical changes that occurred with the development of printing technology, digitization creates new possibilities of information production, analysis, and exchange [3]. New planning tools and methods are needed to cope with contemporary mutations, and meet the ever-changing realities of cities. Moreover, citizens are often left outside the planning process, although they hold a central position to produce and share useful knowledge on how they live and use the city [4–7]. Indeed, the development of technology and the widespread use of the Internet and smartphones offer new means to improve exchange and support urban planning [8,9]. It represents an opportunity to generate new forms of interaction between the urban planners and the city dwellers for a more sustainable and responsive planning [10,11]. Producing a large amount of user-generated and ground sensing data, digital tools offer new perspectives for a better-informed and citizen-centric planning. However, digital tools are often experimental and rarely integrated in an actual planning process. Data produced through digital methods are seldom used to inform planning [12,13]. The complexity of the issues, the social and urban dynamics and the multiplicity of stakeholders all constitute elements that call into question the process of sharing and producing information and knowledge. It is therefore important to determine the potential role that urban data and technology can play in this context. How does technology change urban planning practices? What are the opportunities and limitations of technology to improve urban planning? And finally, how should the city of tomorrow be planned? This research firstly aims to investigate how planning processes are evolving to take advantage of data and technology. Secondly, it seeks to determine the benefits and constraints of using digital tools in urban planning system, focusing in particular on knowledge and data exchange. 2. Methodology and key findings The research questions are answered by an in-depth analysis of planning processes encountered in two case studies: Singapore and Geneva. We examine the current state of planning and how it is evolving in recent years. Fieldwork comprises unstructured and semi-structured interviews with brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Infoscience - École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne