Building Knowledge Together: Citizen Science, Communication, and Trust | 5 - 6 October 2026, Berlin

(Der Vortrag kann auf Deutsch oder Englisch gehalten werden)

Participation has become a key normative principle of contemporary urban planning. Planning processes are expected not only to produce technically sound solutions, but also to enhance transparency, legitimacy, and responsiveness to citizens’ needs. In practice, however, meaningful participation often remains difficult to achieve. One reason is that planning proposals are usually communicated through maps, technical drawings, or other abstract representations that are difficult for non-experts to interpret. This limits citizens’ ability to imagine future spatial situations, evaluate alternatives, and contribute informed feedback at stages when decisions are still open to influence.
This talk examines whether low-cost virtual reality (VR) applications based on existing digital planning data can improve communication in participatory planning and, in doing so, foster trust in planning-related knowledge and evaluation processes. The talk presents a practice-oriented research approach at the interface of participation, communication, and trust. Empirically, it draws on two connected components: a stakeholder-based requirements analysis with experts from urban planning and participation practice (N = 20), and a case study on a VR-supported participation process accompanying the redesign, before and after implementation, of a public basketball area in Chemnitz, Germany (N = 99). Particular attention is paid to the potential of this low-threshold approach for groups that are often difficult to address through conventional planning formats, including people with impairments as well as more volatile participant groups such as children and adolescents. The study investigates how immersive visualization can be embedded in routine planning workflows, how citizens perceive this form of communication before and after implementation, and how such tools shape the relationship between expert planning knowledge and citizens’ experiential perspectives.
The findings suggest that immersive visualization can reduce abstraction barriers and create a shared point of reference for communication between planners and citizens. Even comparatively simple VR models based on routine CAD data helped participants understand spatial proposals, assess design elements, and articulate more concrete feedback. In this sense, VR did not merely function as a visualization technology, but as a communicative interface through which planning knowledge became more accessible, discussable, and evaluable. From a trust perspective, this is significant because trust did not primarily emerge as trust in technology itself, but rather as situated trust in the comprehensibility, fairness, and relevance of the participation process.
Participants were better able to relate planning proposals to their own everyday experience and to judge the plausibility of planning-related evidence. At the same time, the study also highlights the limits of immersive participation. Trust is not automatically produced by digital innovation. It depends on low-threshold usability, transparent communication about what virtual models can and cannot represent, institutional compatibility with existing planning routines, and the visible uptake of citizens’ contributions.
The post-implementation evaluation is particularly important in this regard: by comparing the VR simulation with the realized environment, the study shows that immersive representations can support early-stage understanding very well, while also revealing where expectations, realism, and built outcomes diverge. This makes VR relevant not only as an anticipatory participation tool, but also as an instrument for post-implementation reflection and participatory learning. The paper contributes to current debates on participation, communication, and trust by showing how low-cost immersive tools can mediate between scientific or expert-based planning practices and public evaluation. More broadly, it argues that trust in participatory planning is strengthened not by technological sophistication alone, but by communicative formats that make knowledge more understandable, procedures more transparent, and citizens’ perspectives more meaningfully integrated into evaluation and decision-making.
In this sense, low-cost VR can serve as a practical and empirically grounded example of how participatory communication may support trust in evidence-informed planning processes.