Express Yourself/City—Smart Participation Culture Technologies

This paper highlights the motivation for new participatory tools and methods in urban planning; and proposes optical tracking as a solution to improve Augmented Reality (AR) features in participatory urban planning software. Actual software and tools for smart-city-planning target only on the relevant administration staff, architects and other professionals. These systems create significant barriers for citizens’ participation in the planning process as they were designed with the professional user in mind. Professionals are used to work with highly abstract data, while citizens and many creatives would require much more direct visualization. What are needed are smart interactive and visual tools like in-situ-mixed-reality, combining the real location with planning data. The Betaville system, a participatory platform for urban re-design, combines all these features and allows all people to engage in urban planning. The project “Express Yourself/city”, a sub-project of “The People’s Smart Sculpture PS2”, works as a discussion forum, combining social and cultural demands for participation in urban development with new technical approaches. One goal of “Express Yourself/city” is to improve the usability of Betaville. To achieve that, the augmented reality feature needs to be redefined. The project “Markerless Adaptive Mobile Augmented Reality in Games MadMAGs” is dedicated to providing a solution based on optical tracking.