Opportunities and New Challenges in the Digitization of Citizen Participation in Urban Projects, in Chile and Colombia

Abstract

The development of citizen participation processes for planning and urban design through new technological tools has been a growing phenomenon for decades, which has accelerated in recent years due to the global COVID-19 health emergency . The objective of this work is to analyze opportunities and challenges in a diverse group of urban participation processes that have been advanced in an exploratory manner in new methodologies and digital tools for participation both in Chile and Colombia, countries with different urban governances within Latin America. The research is carried out through interviews and focus groups with urban planners and designers belonging to the public and private spheres of both countries, apart from participant observation in some digital instances. Some of the results are the potential of ICT´s to strengthen processes, although it isa more complex methodological and procedural scenario that needs to be previously legitimized before the citizenry. This work concludes that there are significant obstacles to achieving open and collaborative digital environments that allow bottom-up urbanism, explained partly by the lack of a critical perspective to approach the digitalization of participation.