The paper reports on methods of how to reflect citizen opinions for community level environmental planning. The author aims to organize the citizen involvement methods based on the empirical studies conducted by himself and others.
In the process of the environmental planning, the three actors of the local government, planners, and citizen have to be taken into consideration. The role of citizen involvement in the planning process is information exchange among the citizen, the goverment and the planners. There are two kinds of citizen involvement technologies. The one is citizen opinions survey, and the other is citizen participation meetings for planning. Reviewing previous surveys conducted by Japanese researchers including the author, opinion surveys are considered to be useful especially for evaluating the state of the present environment. But it can not be applied directly to evaluate the future state of the environment altered by the proposed plans.
There are two kinds of approaches to evaluate the future state of the environment for selecting appropriate planning alternatives. One is the approach which can reflect the public opinions indirectly utilizing opinion surveys partially in the systems analysis framework. The other is that reflects the public opinions directly by citizen participation meetings in the planning process.
In the former approach, the state of the future environmental quality is evaluated in an analytical manner. The total quality of the environment,
Vo, is descrived by combination of quality of divided aspect
i of the environment,
Vi, and its relative importance (weight),
Wi. The public opinions will be reflected in the weight
Wi chosen by some kinds of opinion surveys. Examining the previous studies of the authors and the others, the followings results are observed.
(1) Many results supports that
Vo can be described by an additive form of
Vi and
Wi.
Vo=
Wi Vi …(
n is the number of aspects of environmental quality)
(2)
Wi could be chosen relatively well by applying the weighting methods of mathematical psycholpgy though more improvement is necessary.
(3) Definning the form of function
Vi=
fi(
Xi) is very difficult at this moment as a great deal of empirical knowledge required for it is lacking. Here,
X denotes the objective measurement of an aspect of the environmental quality.
The latter approach is utilizing citizen participation meetings for reflecting the public opinions directly in the planning porocess. This approach is possible in community level environmental planning as people can imagine the future state of their environmnt more easily than that of the wider area like city. In public meetings, group surveys are applied effectively. Especially, real time Delphi method is applied to evaluate the future state of the planned environment by utilizing electronic voting systems such as the Group Analyzer developed by the authors. The effectiveness of this approach for choosing the preference of the people in certain area has been shown in several empirical studies conducted by the authors in Tsukuba, Yamagata, and other places.
It is also discussed that the effective use of citizen participation meetings in the planning process could be extended by applying new regional informationcommunication systems like CATV in an area.
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