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The urbanization and densification of cities, along with climate change, have brought the value of green urban infrastructure for ecological, social, and cultural sustainability to the forefront of research. In parallel, the need to develop information systems for green environment and green area planning has been recognized. The role of green information in city information models has lagged behind that of the built environment (Münzinger et al., 2022), and there is a lack of tools for co-planning the development and maintenance of green spaces.
Various planning support systems (PSSes) have been developed for analytical and collaborative planning purposes, but their implementation in actual planning has been a challenge. The so-called implementation gap between the demands of planning and the supply of tools that support planning tasks was identified years ago (e.g., Te Brömmelstroet & Schrijnen, 2010; Vonk et al., 2005) and remains relevant today. The implementation gap refers to the mismatch between the technology (i.e., digital tools) and the needs and activities of the users. The complexity of planning problems is argued to be a major challenge in developing PSS tools to support planning tasks (Geertman, 2017). This complexity is not only related to planning tasks but also to the broad range of different stakeholders in planning processes and differences between planning organizations. User-centered design (UCD), i.e., focusing on end-users’ perspectives and increasing dialogue between planners (users) and tool developers, has been proposed as remedies to bridge the implementation gap (Te Brömmelstroet & Schrijnen, 2010) and produce applications that are genuinely useful for planning.
The planning of urban green spaces has its own specific planning questions, such as the continuous change of existing vegetation, the impact of maintenance activities on the environment, and the uncertainties associated with the plans (e.g., how the planned vegetation will succeed in the site and how the environment will affect the vegetation). Additionally, it has been argued that there is a need for the co-creation of the solutions with a wide range of stakeholders, and the importance of engaging citizens and local communities in planning and maintaining green areas has been emphasized (Dos Santos et al., 2021). The communicative planning of urban greening can relate, for example, to questions of preserving green areas in densification projects or enhancing the quality of existing urban areas by adding new plants or greenery.
Recent related research has included novel approaches to the sustainability of cities that suggest, for example, more nature-based solutions and enhancing biodiversity in urban areas (Stroud et al., 2022). Research is also contributing to the need to understand citizens’ needs for and experiences of an urban green environment. Recent studies have shown novel methods for analyzing landscape preferences (Schrammeijer et al., 2022) and identifying citizens’ ideas and visions to improve green infrastructure (Palliwoda et al., 2022). Public participation (or geoparticipation) GIS methods have also been used to obtain the social values of green areas (Rall et al., 2019). Other topics relate, for example, to the health benefits of green environments (Liu et al., 2022) and the perceived well-being effects of nature (Puhakka, 2021).
This article contributes to the existing literature by studying the process of engaging prospective users of a communicative planning support system (CPSS) for urban and green area planning. The novelty of this research is in combining user-centered methodology in a research and innovation project where communicative planning of urban and green areas includes novel 3D PSS tools. This article focuses on a user-centered process, in which user insight was gathered and utilized in the early phase of tool development. Another novel aspect of the research is that it is not a single PSS that is being developed but a system consisting of several elements (see Figure 1), whose users include not only planners but also citizens. The practical value of this paper is to help integrate user research into corresponding research and development projects that are limited in terms of human and time resources.