Critical success factors of participatory community planning with geospatial digital participatory platforms

Abstract

In recent years, Digital Participatory Platforms (DPPs) have become an increasingly popular tool for citizen participation in community planning processes. They serve municipalities, citizen initiatives, and other planning authorities as digital tools to collect feedback, discuss ideas, solve problems and monitor small-scale planning processes within their communities. In addition, DPPs facilitate the integration of the spatial domain into participatory community planning. In this paper, we assess the most important Critical Success Factors (CSFs) of participatory community planning with geospatial DPPs, and analyze the potential, opportunities, and challenges associated with integrating these platforms into community planning. We analyze the results of a digital questionnaire that we shared with a selected group of expert scholars and community stakeholders. We then contextualize this feedback with our experiences from the piloting phase and commercial roll-out of the ‘Bürgercockpit’-application for participatory community planning within the Austrian Agenda21-framework. As a result, we identify the most important CSFs of participatory community planning with geospatial DPPs. This set of CSFs should provide a better orientation on how to complement well-established analog participatory methods and practices with geospatial DPPs for the co-production of shared visions and solutions, ultimately empowering all stakeholders of a planning process to better manage their communities. © 2025 by the authors.