Honours Thesis, Pierre Beaudreau

Congratulations, Pierre on finishing your undergraduate honours thesis as well as a dynamic application.

YouSayCity: an Online 3D Public Participation Tool for Urban Planning

This project explores the opportunities offered by Web 2.0 technologies and ICTs in developing an online 3D interactive application oriented towards public participation, information sharing, and online deliberation in the context of urban planning. Using existing technologies and previous research as the basis for the application development criteria, a new application, coined ‘YouSayCity’ for the purpose of this research, is developed.

The first section of this thesis outlines select topics in urban planning, decision-making and public participation. Following this, concepts surrounding the Internet’s Web 2.0 framework, industry leading technologies as well as previous research in the field lends insight into the technological side of planning, decision- making and public participation. This will then setup the criteria for the development of a virtual environment planning system, in this case an application. Following this, the development aspect and evaluation of the online web application is presented. I conclude with the resulting application’s functionalities, limitations, and its possible impacts on the problems outlined in the fields of urban planning, public participation and decision-making.