What if we could see the future of our city or municipality at a glance? With ARPAS, we want to use new technologies to provide an outlook on the future of participation.
Urban planning is often complex and difficult for citizens to understand. Young adults in particular, as well as people with poor language skills or a lower affinity for text, are often not sufficiently taken into account in current participation processes. Our aim is therefore to actively involve all citizens in planning processes and to create cities and municipalities where everyone feels comfortable and heard.
As part of the ARPAS project, we are developing an innovative, visual and interactive form of participation that is specifically aimed at involving groups that are less likely to participate in urban and local development. By combining augmented reality and instant participation, we want to create a participation process that enables citizens to participate visually and instantly in democratic urban planning processes. While augmented reality has so far mainly been used in the entertainment sector, we see great potential in using this technology in order to motivate more people to playfully participate in urban planning issues. In this way, the diverse living realities of the population can be better taken into account in urban development in the future.
Together with our project partner, the University of Applied Sciences Berlin (HTW), we are researching and testing the innovative uses of augmented reality in digital public participation. Our project includes determining the target group requirements for the AR application, integrating an AR component into a participation platform, designing a customized participation process and a comprehensive practical test in order to fully utilize the potential of this technology.
