GIS, social media and simulation in integrated ICT solutions for urban futures

ICT tools and their methods to support the policy lifecycle in urban planning have drastically changed with the emergence of social media, advanced simulation techniques, open government data, big data, opinion mining, advanced text analytics and visualization. All those components should be combined with GIS. Current ICT solutions supporting e-participation and collaborative urban planning are focused on solving a specific problem. They are not integrated neither on the conceptual nor on the technical level. The conceptual level referring to the policy lifecycle, the technical level to data integration and user interface. This paper describes a new integrated approach to policy design and implementation. It consists of an advanced policy lifecycle and an IT-solution with features supporting all phases of the proposed lifecycle. The concept as well as the technical architecture as implemented in the Future Policy Modelling Project (FUPOL) to achieve such a complete integration with separate applications is outlined.