A 3D GIS For Public Participation In Planning

The benefits of public participation in planning have been widely recognized by many researchers. On the one hand, the valuable community knowledge and local expertise contributed by the general public can help planners make good designs which can better satisfy the needs of local residents. On the other hand, allowing the general public to participate in the decision-making process, which may directly or indirectly affect their own interests, can increase people's satisfaction toward the government and promote the development of social democracy.The general public can participate in the planning process through a number of approaches. According to the particular behaviors conducted by the participants in the planning process, such approaches can be classified into two categories:the commenting approach and the designing approach. The commenting approach contains the ways in which the public make comments on existing plans, while the designing approach refers to the ways in which people modify existing plans and design new ones. Usually, common citizens participate in the planning process through the commenting approach while those who have some professional background and experiences use the designing approach.With technological advancements, the tools and systems supporting the two approaches of public participation have also been improved. Nowadays, people can employ emails and websites instead of regular mails to express their opinions toward a plan. Similarly, pencils and paper-based maps are replaced by geographic information systems and other computer-based designing tools which can better help people make plans. Meanwhile,3D visualization technology has also been used to render urban plans as virtual scenes which can be easily understood by not only experts but also common citizens. However, two limits still exist in current tools and systems. First, although many systems can visualize plans as 3D models and although they allow people to make comments or design plans through the Internet, such systems are unable to help the general public who are often distributed in different locations to implement collaborative planning in the virtual environment on the Internet. Second, existing systems cannot simultaneously support the two public participation approaches (the commenting approach and the designing approach). Since different approaches are often employed by different groups of people to participate in planning, existing systems may not be able to completely collect the public's opinions.In this thesis, we developed a 3D GIS which effectively addresses both of the two limits. Our system combines the technologies of virtual globe, the Internet, socket, and multi-threading, and can help people who are distributed in different locations to collaborate and to design plans in the virtual environment on the Internet. Besides, our system uses two subsystems (a designing subsystem and a commenting subsystem) to support both the commenting and designing approaches. The designing subsystem enables the people who have some professional experiences to collaborate with experts and to work out draft plans, while the commenting subsystem allows the general public to make comments on these draft plans.The architecture and implementation of our system have been discussed in this paper. We also provide a scenario to illustrate how this system helps the planning participants (including the public and experts) collaborate in the virtual environment and how it effectively supports both the designing and the commenting approaches of public participation.