Informal participation in digital planning: How can third parties use social media to shift power relations in planning?
Power relation study by Social Network Analysis
Sep 16, 2024
📢 New Publication: Informal Participation in Digital Planning: Shifting Power Relations
Our latest research on informal participation and social media's role in reshaping urban planning is now published in *Computers, Environment and Urban Systems*.
Sep 16, 2024
Measuring social network influence on power relations in collaborative planning: A case study of Beijing City, China
Unequal power relations in online planning controversy
Jan 1, 2024
The Role of Social Media in Reshaping the Power of Third Parties in Urban Planning
Journalists and civil society organizations use social media to challenge planning decisions.
Jun 13, 2023
ERC Starting Grant project CoChina
As a PhD Candidate, Junyao He has been involved in collaborative planning research in China in collaboration Dr. Yanliu Lin, Dr. Hongmei Lu and Xiaomeng Zhou since July 2021. He focuses on power relations and social network analysis. This research is part of the ERC funded project CoChina. This project is led by Dr. Yanliu Lin, Associate Professor of Spatial Planning and Digitalization in the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning for the topic of “Collaborative planning in China: Authoritarian institutions, new media, power relations, and public spheres”. It is funded for five years (2021-2026) through a Starting Grant awarded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 947879). Collaborative planning has become an effective means to address conflicts of interest in urban renewal and environmental management in China. However, the egalitarian principles that ground collaborative planning theory call into question its validity in China. The theory emphasizes consensus building in which various stakeholders come together for dialogue to address controversial issues. It rests on three assumptions: democratic institutions, neutral power and communicative rationality. These assumptions, which are often debated in the Western context, should clearly be questioned in the Chinese context, due to authoritarian deliberation and the challenging nature of power relations. Therefore, the overall aim of this project is to examine collaborative planning practices in China and identify the challenges to the assumptions of collaborative planning theory about institutions, power relations, and public spheres. It leads to a new understanding of collaborative planning in China, and a reconceptualization of the collaborative planning theory.
Jul 1, 2021