Title: Democratic Deliberation in the Wild: The McGill Online Design Studio and the RegulationRoom Project
Abstract: 2. Information Overload True deliberation requires information. Democratic deliberative exercises are always structured to include an educational component that prepares participants to discuss the relevant facts and issues, recognize the competing values at stake, and weigh alternatives from multiple perspectives. (78) In the contexts of land use planning and rulemaking, the challenge in moving public participation towards the democratic deliberative ideal is generally not a lack of information per se. Government decision makers typically generate, or pay consultants to generate, a mass of studies, analyses, and assessments during the process of developing a proposal. Unfortunately, even when this material is available to citizens, it is rarely comprehensible to them without help. Often voluminous and filled with technical, legal, or other jargon, such material is virtually always written from the inside perspective of the professional consultant, regulator, or planner--with little effort to present context, problems, constraints, and options in terms that make sense to ordinary people. (79) For this reason, efforts to make public participation processes more deliberative must include ways to present the information people need in forms that they are able and willing to consume. a. The McGill Online Design Studio Land use planning gives rise to several challenges relating to information overload. The first is legal. Planning law is elaborate, and is comprised of intricate and often technical statutes and regulations. Even apart from the law, planning is a complex activity that requires an understanding of the distinctive features of the land that is the object of a plan, the interactions of citizens in that space, and the aspirations of those who live in it. To make these information burdens more manageable, the MODS team used a set of strategies that mirror those of RegulationRoom (described below). For instance, the project team prioritizes the most relevant information from the primary planning documents. The statutory provisions that govern a site-specific plan are multiple, lengthy, and complicated. Moreover, a site-specific plan is meant to be responsive to the features of the relevant land and to the priorities of the local community with respect to that land; as such, these materials are also quite extensive. To reduce informational burden on participants, the team focuses attention on the particular features of the Bellechasse site that the community has identified as important, and highlights the regulatory outcomes the site-specific plan aims to achieve. Furthermore, the project website organizes information in a way that enables the user to identify what the site-specific plan has proposed regarding the community's priorities in the Bellechasse site, and to explore (or discover) and comment on what the user finds significant about that element of the site. The website does so by presenting a map that, through a collection of markers, identifies the specific geographic locations on the site that consultations revealed to be areas of interest to the community (Figure 4). Each marker, when clicked, navigates users to a page containing a condensed version of the site plan's proposals for that area, coupled with a variety of pictures, maps, and hyperlink resources that enable the individual users to identify and explore their own preoccupations with the Bellechasse site (Figures 1, 2). [FIGURE 4 OMITTED] The statutory language of planning law and the jargon of planning professionals can appear to the layperson to be impenetrable or inaccessible. The project website responds to this obstacle by translating complex statutes into comprehensible text and maps. Similarly, the website makes the expertise of planners accessible through a combination of clear and simple descriptions and analyses, as well as through design proposals that are presented visually. …
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 6
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