ABSTRACT
Urban planning is complex. It combines data and opinion on social, political, economic and environmental issues. In western societies, planners are responding to new challenges to make planning more transparent, e.g. e-democracy, open government, and it has been argued that any solution should increase participation in the process. New technologies could be employed to promote dialogue and make the process less confrontational and easier to understand. The research at the University of Salford is designing and building a prototype which links emerging virtual reality (VR) and Internet technologies with (more mature) geographical information technologies. These geographical visual information systems (GVIS) are being designed to facilitate participation by multiple stakeholders in urban regeneration projects. In this chapter we consider how such a prototype can adopt a framework based on theories of learning and how that framework can be used to evaluate impacts of GVIS in urban planning.
