Digital Citizen Participation – Involving Citizens Through Immersive Systems in Urban Planning

Citizen participation is a democratic practice that became, especially on a local level, an important mean for the public to be included in the development of their immediate surrounding. With the digitalization of work and social life also the digitalization of the public sector, including governmental action, began. This process, as a research discipline called digital government, includes addressing how the interaction between citizens and their state should be designed. A meaningful way to do so are digital platforms that enable participation in governmental action. Digital Citizen Participation, a concept introduced in this dissertation, tries to include recent technological innovations in e-Participation platform design. This dissertation argues that these innovations might help overcome general barriers in participation processes. When it comes to construction projects in urban environments for example, public debates and protests may arise if architectural plans remain unshared or are not sufficiently accessible for the citizens they might affect. To involve the public affected by urban planning, offering easily graspable visualizations for citizens is key. ... mehrThis dissertation deals with the participation of citizens in urban planning through an e-Participation platform that makes use of immersive technologies such as Augmented and Virtual Reality. In this work, this idea is investigated through a design science research approach that uses qualitative and quantitative methods. While the first qualitative study puts for-ward a set of meta-requirements and design principles based on interviews with 27 individuals, the second study (n=339) and third study (n=382) evaluate quantitatively a prototype based on those design principles. The used methods are adequately contex-tualized and, in the end, a final prototype of the platform is demonstrated. This allows to show findings concerning the forms and levels of participation citizens and initiators are interested in when using immersive systems for public participation, and how an ideal platform should be designed. Among many other findings, the studies show that citizens have a high interest in using immersive systems for public participation and find their qualities for visualization to be highly valuable.