Exploring the Visibility Gap Between Public Investment and Media Discourse in the Wrocław Participatory Budget

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the media visibility of investments implemented in Wrocław, with a particular focus on the democratization of urban processes through the Wrocław Participatory Budget (WPB) and to study the public perception of these projects within the local information landscape. The paper presents an integrated analytical methodology combining geospatial data from the Spatial Information System of Wrocław (SIP) with textual data from the full corpus of local news articles from Wrocław. A hybrid data processing pipeline was used, including filtering of articles about Wrocław, geoparsing of location names, matching articles to investments using classic Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) models and embedding in language models such as HerBERT, and sentiment analysis using the XLM-T model. The results reveal strong imbalances in the visibility of WPB projects, that almost 90% of investments were not mentioned even once in the media. Temporal sentiment analysis indicated differences between categories of WPB projects. The results confirm the existence of “media deserts” and “islands of attention,” which leads to information exclusion for specific local communities and marginalized groups. This translates into asymmetry in residents’ knowledge of the real scope of the WPB program. The paper emphasizes the importance of Geographic Information System (GIS) fusion methods with natural language processing models (NLP) for urban research, and identifies directions for further analysis, including accompanying problems and limitations in the present day.