Citizen
participation in urban planning has been a topic of academic and practical interest
since the 1960s. The adoption of information and communication technologies for
civic participation, electronic participation, impacts how citizens and urban
planners interact. Within the field of electronic participation, mobile
participation is a rather recent chapter. The proliferation of mobile
technologies enables both novel forms of participation and the embeddedness of
these technologies into existing practices of participation. This dissertation
contains five studies exploring how emerging practices of mobile
participation are changing citizen participation in urban planning.

Each
of the five studies describes a facet of mobile participation, beginning with
an overview of participatory planning apps in use; exploring next how citizens
develop apps themselves; turning then to the theoretical basis of mobile
participation grounded in previous theories of participation and the digital
divide; covering further the actual usage of the Täsä urban planning app; and
finally, discussing self-organized community planning using mobile
technologies.

The
results provide an overview of the specific features enhancing democratic urban
planning, asses who develops mobile apps and with what intentions, and
contrasts the circumstances conducive to inclusiveness in mobile participation.
Mobile phones are ubiquitous and possess a combination of unique affordances
such as situated engagement and participatory sensing, enabling rich, real-time
data collection and experimentation. These features resonate with early adopters
who, in order to affect change, need to be embedded in the institutional civic
participation setting. For citizens, mobile technologies have diversified the
roles of participation, so that citizens can choose between being informed,
contributing ideas, or developing applications. Finally, the apps developed
with open data are the result of negotiations between developers’ agency and
open data availability.

 Overall,
this dissertation suggests that mobile participation is socially constructed in
as far as the features and practices implemented are subject to a host of
stakeholder interests. To this end, mobile participation is conceptualized as maximum
allowed deviation: it affords new practices that reshape citizen
participation while being part of established forms of civic participation.