Exploring Urban Data Visualization and Public Participation in Planning

Regulations in urban governance stipulate that large amounts of urban data be made available to the public with the intention of informing and enhancing decision making by businesses and citizens. Yet, the Planning and Building Permit Archive for the City of Oslo as one such source of data, only enables pinhole access by the public, denying public dissemination of planning and urban development issues beyond individual building and planning cases. Based on a set of experiments by the designer Even Westvang in a project called SeePlan, the article discusses how visualizing data from the Planning and Building Permit Archive may extend the available repertoire for the public to participate in urban planning.