Association Between Democracy Index and Studies on the Utilization of Immersion and Participation Techniques in Urban Planning

Abstract Background: Public participation is a key component in the process of urban planning, helping to formulate problems and requirements, and, eventually, cooperate in the final solution. The new visualization and immersion possibilities offered by augmented and virtual reality appear to be feasible instruments for facilitating the involvement of the public in the participatory planning process. Methods: The presented paper provides an overview and characterization of individual methods of presentation of urban planning intentions to the public, including novel augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) methods. These definitions were subsequently used to identify the intensity of research on the use of AR/VR in individual countries and analyzed the associations between that intensity and the democracy index (DI) characterizing those countries (only countries with a sufficient gross domestic product were included). Results: We proposed definitions of individual techniques of visualization for improving public participation in the urban planning process, including the discussion on the level of immersion achievable using individual techniques. In addition, statistically significant correlation was found between the intensity of research on the use of such techniques and the democracy index (r = 0.376, p << 0.001), suggesting a potential association. Conclusions: The proposed definitions can be helpful in future research in this field, supporting the comparability of results. As expected, the research on such techniques is more intensive in countries with more developed democracies. Still, it must be considered that higher level of virtualization does not always necessarily mean higher level of immersion and that advanced techniques can be used for misleading presentation of the urban planning intentions, even in democratic countries.