ABSTRACT
CONTENTS 15.1 Introduction ............................................................................................. 329 15.2 Policy Context ......................................................................................... 330 15.3 Project Context ........................................................................................ 332 15.4 Technical Features .................................................................................. 334
15.4.1 Boundary-Free Small-Area Estimates.................................... 334 15.4.2 User-Defined Target Areas ..................................................... 337 15.4.3 Information Dissemination Rather Than Analysis.............. 338
15.5 Data Issues ............................................................................................... 339 15.6 Community Use ...................................................................................... 341 15.7 Organizational Context.......................................................................... 343 15.8 Conclusions.............................................................................................. 344 References ........................................................................................................... 345
Engaging the active participation of citizens in the processes of civic governance has been a laudable, if largely unrealized goal, of local governments for decades. Recently, this goal has been much reemphasized in the United Kingdom. Almost every recent U.K. government initiative places a clear onus on local governments to collaborate with their communities. Local authorities must nowestablish community strategies and form local strategic partnerships to reflect community interests. In the main, however, the public have been
steadfastly disinterested in participation exercises. Participation in local elections and attendance at local meetings are usually depressingly low. The Internet has recently been seized upon as a new vehicle with which
to reengage the public. Visionaries look forward to a future in which Internetbased systemswill be used to involve citizens in developments in their locality, encouraging citizens to interact directly with professionals and policy makers in local decision-making processes. Becausemany of the issues that affect local government are land or property based, WebGIS are seen as having a major role to play within this movement towards Internet participation. There is already a significant literature describing experiments in public participation GIS (PPGIS) (Craig et al., 1998; ESF-NSF, 2001; Laurini, 2001). Achieving the future, however, is always more difficult than the visionar-
ies, and vendors, suggest. The rhetoric surrounding PPGIS has raced far ahead of reality as represented by present PPGIS. WebGIS packages provide the technologies by which local agencies might deliver spatial information into the homes of citizens but we still are at the very beginning of the learning curve of understanding how to design systems based on these technologies efficiently to engage the public’s interest. We need to understand what information should be presented, how that information is most effectively presented, and what is required for the public to be able to use the information. It is doubtful if any present PPGIS could yet claim to have become a major channel for participation between citizens and policy makers. We are still at the stage of seeing what works, of experiments and projects. This paper contributes to the continuing PPGIS debate by detailing the
PPGIS built for the Bradford Community Statistics Project (BCSP; www. bcsp-web.org). The BCSP’s Maps and Stats system is an innovative and purposeful PPGIS, the lessons from which should be of interest to both researchers and other local governments. Some PPGIS sites appear primarily to be designed to disseminate prepared mapped-based information to residents and, with such sites, the manner in which the data are presented remains largely controlled by the sites’ owners. The primary purpose of the Maps and Stats system, however, is to put into the hands of residents the datasets and online tools necessary to allow them, independently, to research conditions within their communities. Our site invites users to actively engage with data, rather than passively to receive them. A further distinctive feature of the BCSP is that the Maps and Stats PPGIS has been developed as one element within a broader project to build the capacity of local communities to understand and critically appraise the statistical bases upon which decisions about their localities are being made.
