Role of Local Contextual Factors in Building Public Participation GIS: The Milwaukee Experience

By virtue of its cost and technological complexity, GIS has been critiqued as an elitist anti-democratic technology. In response there has been an ongoing proliferation of public participation GIS (PPGIS) initiatives in order to facilitate citizen participation in planning. It is critical to conduct case study research ofthese initiatives, in order to identify factors and conditions fostering sustainable PPGIS initiatives at the local level. Through the case of Milwaukee, this paper explores the local contextual factors and the network of actors and institutions that foster the PPGIS process in that city. Particular attention is paid to the role of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and its efforts to provide equitable public access to GIS through university/community partnerships. The paper critically explores the PPGIS initiatives undertaken in Milwaukee and concludes that the initiatives contain contradictory impulses of creating simultaneous empowerment of community organizations and their dependence on the network of stakeholder institutions.

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