Virtual attendees as a contribution in the processes of citizen participation of development and territorial planning plans

For the formulation of public policies, citizen participation that promotes the deliberation, planning and decision making of public affairs management is indispensable. Territorial planning is a public policy that has as an instrument the development and territorial planning plans (PDOT) whose objective is to meet the needs of the population to improve their quality of life. The problem of the territories to be planned requires different methods and tools to approach the population to involve them. In the Cuenca canton, citizen participation is generally produced through citizen, face-to-face and virtual assemblies due to COVID-19. Among the greatest difficulties for technicians are the generation of information inputs and the ignorance of the stages of the planning process by citizenship. The information is more visible and understandable through maps, but not necessarily the citizen is accustomed to using them, even worse to find them on the platforms that are made available. Space data infrastructure (IDES) allow access to geoinformation and obtain connectivity to official sources, unlike commercial tools. On the other hand, virtual attendees have brought the citizen common to data sources that are not easy to obtain and that having a more personalized interface, facilitate their use. These are a useful tool to support citizen participation processes through IDES to transparent and democratize geo -information as input for territory planning.

2nd UNIVERSITY COMPETITION FOR RESEARCH-LINKAGE PROJECTS