A geospatial tangible user interface to support stakeholder participation in urban planning

The complexity of urban projects today requires new approaches to integrate stakeholders with different professional backgrounds. Traditional tools used in urban planning are designed for experts and offer little opportunity for participation and collaborative design. This paper introduces the concept of Geospatial Tangible User Interfaces (GTUI), and reports on the design and implementation of such a GTUI to support stakeholder participation in collaborative urban planning. The proposed system uses physical objects to interact with large digital maps and geospatial data projected onto a tabletop. It is implemented using a PostGIS database, a web map server, the computer vision framework reacTIVision, a Java based TUIO client, and GeoTools. Based on a series of comments collected during an evaluation workshop with stakeholders in the fields of urban and energy planning, we discuss how maps projected on a table and physical objects can be an new approach to participatory bottom-up urban planning.