2015/07/28 by Steven M. Radil, Junfeng Jiao · 1 citation
Environmental Science · Social Sciences · #Geographic Information Systems Studies #Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis #Land Use and Ecosystem Services
paper · doi:10.1080/00330124.2015.1054750
crossref issued 2015/07/28 · crossref published 2015/07/28 · crossref published-online 2015/07/28 · openalex publication_date 2015/07/28 · crossref created 2015/07/28 · crossref published-print 2016/04/02 · crossref deposited 2024/06/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/31 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Public participatory geographic information systems (PPGIS) have been advanced as a means to include those who have been traditionally excluded from numerous place-specific governance activities, including planning and policymaking and as a way to resolve some of the long-standing tensions between critical traditions in human geography and the ever-expanding field of GIS. Despite the rapid adoption of participatory GIS by academics, government officials, and planning professionals, there are few guidelines of best practices for PPGIS researchers and practitioners to draw on and little effort has been made to understand how and in what ways PPGIS efforts are (or perhaps are not) effective. This article contributes to these important debates by evaluating the geography of participation in a recent participatory planning project undertaken in Muncie, Indiana. Using the mapped information that was generated from a series of public meetings, we have identified the presence of significant spatial bias in the process of participation that affected the resulting plan. This was an unexamined source of bias during this process and an example of why any emerging conversations about the best practices for PPGIS must include a consideration of the geography of participation.