Executive Summary

In the wake of more inclusive and sustainable cities, as targeted in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11, public administrators and urban planners aspire to incorporate the pluralism of public values into decision making. To do so, it is paramount to have a solid understanding of the various values at stake, identify them inclusively and address their conflicts. While plenty of public participation geographic information systems are now deployed all across the globe and collect big participatory data from local citizens, the identification of public values and their conflicts is still considered a fundamental issue.

This study shows a novel approach on how one can identify both public values and potential areas of conflict with participatory data and the help of natural language processing as well as spatial clustering techniques. We select Hamburg, Germany as a case study due to its ongoing large-scale urban development projects and the availability of data from an opensource digital participation system deployed by the city. Applying our approach to 4,500 geo-referenced contributions across multiple participation projects, we identify 17 public values and nine archetypal conflicts in Hamburg’s local context. Aside from economic opportunity, ecologic quality and social equity, many contributions revolve around livability (including the values of tranquility, aesthetics, sport, recreation, cleanliness and social interaction), health, safety and conservatism. Examples of embedded value conflicts are, amongst others, the property conflict between the values of economic opportunity and social equity, the drawback of beauty conflict between the values of tranquility and aesthetics and the dangers of nature conflict between the values of safety and ecology.

Eventually, we integrate our findings in a conceptual model able to capture and display the various values and their conflicts. These “public value spheres” provide multiple ways to snapshot and map out the values and conflicts involved in a specific spatiotemporal setting and can be used in planning projects around the world. Ultimately, both the approach and the conceptual model can serve in better understanding the conflicting public values in play and thus support the continuous endeavor of creating more inclusive and sustainable cities.

By 2050, about 10 billion people will inhabit the earth, of which about 70% will live in urban areas (United Nations, 2018). In this context, the UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 addresses inclusive and sustainable urban development. Both inclusivity and sustainability are highly connected to the notion of urban space itself and the role that citizens play in developing it. In the last century, with dominant planning paradigms such as the functional and car-centric city, it was assumed that planners could make technical and apolitical decisions, optimizing the public good objectively in master plans.

While today the political and value-laden nature of urban planning is largely accepted, relicts of the past century still remain: Although the majority of a planner’s daily work is filled with consultation, discussion and mediation, many conceive their job dominantly as the production of plans (see e.g. Lehtovuori, 2016). Still, there has been surprisingly little literature and empirical research on values and their conflicts in the urban development context.

At the same time, technological innovation around the world now enables the collection of data from the citizenry on a large scale. Lowering the threshold of participation, such digital tools provide easy-to-use ways of mapping ideas, feed- back, suggestions and critique of citizens. Because of their scalability, oftentimes hundreds of contributions and comments are collected. Although such data provides a lot of potential to make urban planning more inclusive and sustainable, there is a lack of methods to analyze and make use of this richness of data.

Summing up, the main question that this research addresses is: How can we better understand and map out the pluralistic values and their conflicts involved in urban planning projects with the help of participatory data?

To answer this question, one has to resort to existent work on values and their conflicts in urban planning. At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium, Campbell (1996) and Godschalk (2004) proclaimed a total of six theoretical value conflicts between the dimensions of sustainable urban development and livability.

One, they outline a “property conflict” between the social nature of land and its private and economic development.

Two, they proclaim a “resource conflict” between the economic exploitation of resources versus their ecologic preservation.

Three, the “development conflict” revolves around the question of how to preserve the environment and create better opportunities for dwellers with lower socioeconomic status.

Four, the “gentrification conflict” arises when one develops space towards a more livable environment possibly leading to gentrification and less social equity in the neighborhood.

Five, the “green cities conflict” is about balancing the natural with a livable build environment.

Six, the “growth management conflict” is about developing a livable city against economic interests with phenomena such as urban sprawl.

At the same time, in public administration research, the concept of public values emerged that is concerned with the normative “principles on which governments and policies should be based” (Bozeman, 2007, p. 13). Research shows that there are many public values in different settings which ought to be realized by public authorities, suggesting a multitude of trade-offs and conflicts. In this regard, it is important to note that one can distinguish between instrumental and intrinsic values. While the former are a means to an end (i.e. another value), the latter are an end in itself. Differentiating between individual and public values, one can hold both at the same time in a pluralistic way. Value pluralism is the notion that multiple values can co-exist and contradict each other at the same time.

Building on this foundational work, we designed an empirical case study in Hamburg, Germany, with a larger quantitative and a smaller qualitative part to identify the pluralistic values in play with the help of participatory data. In the quantitative part, more than 4,500 geo-referenced contributions from citizens on Hamburg’s open-source digital participation system (DIPAS) were analyzed and classified into topics using Structural Topic Modeling, a Natural Language Processing method. These topics are formed by an algorithm based on the words of all contributions that frequently occur in connection with other words. If a particular topic coherently reflects a specific value, it was assigned to it manually. Clustering algorithms are then used to find spatial clusters of certain values. Overlaps of such clusters are interpreted as indicators of potential value conflicts.

Following this quantitative study, qualitative expert workshops were held to review the assignment of values to themes and to discuss values and their conflicts in urban development in general. Finally, both parts of the research were integrated in order to gain as much knowledge as possible from the quantitative and qualitative parts.