The Promises of Digital Engagement Platforms in Urban Planning: Between Obligation and Optimisation

Abstract

Digital engagement platforms are increasingly used by built environment professionals to streamline public participation. This thesis critically examines how business and technological logics (e.g. scale and growth) of these platforms intersect with Western liberal planning values such as democracy, equity, and justice in the UK (England) and Australian (NSW) planning contexts. While urban and planning research tends to focus on improving these technologies for better public input, critical perspectives on digital engagement in planning remain limited, particularly compared to emerging critiques of PropTech in housing and real estate. This analysis addresses that gap by exploring what these engagement platforms promise to do, and the practitioners’ understandings and worldviews of it.

Drawing on the anthropology of planning, the research uses a multi-sited, mixed qualitative methodology, including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and discourse analysis. Findings reveal that practitioners framed the digitalisation of engagement as morally aligned with planning’s democratic ethos as, through automation and datafication, they could listen better to communities, reach more people, and value community voices. Yet in practice, these goals were often tempered by political and economic imperatives. Datafication was used not just for engaging ‘better’ but for constructing persuasive narratives to legitimise decisions. Therefore, digital engagement platforms were not neutral tools as they were promised to be but served to reinforce planning values and confer legitimacy.

Underlying this digital shift was a moral impetus to improve democratic participation and planning outcomes. The thesis ultimately proposes a critical urban theory of moral planning, framing planning as a moral field where virtue, legitimacy and governance are continually negotiated, not just through policy or process, but also through the technologies that now mediate civic participation.