The Digital Transformation of Planning (DISCLOSE)
Anna Hersperger, Simona Raluca Gradinaru, Christin Müller, Pouya Sepehr, Didem Türk Grigoletto, Xunran Tan
2025 - 2029
Cooperation FinancingContents ¶
Establishing a theoretical model of how technologies and data are transforming spatial planning practice
Project introduction ¶
The field of spatial planning is currently experiencing a profound shift driven by technological advancements, known as the digital transformation of planning. This transformative process has the potential to reshape the very essence of planning practice and its fundamental values, including equity and social justice, transparency, and efficiency.
Planning has always depended on particular ways of knowing and organising space: maps, plans, models, regulations, categories, projections, scenarios, and forms of expert judgement. What is changing today is the infrastructure through which these forms of knowledge are produced, circulated, combined, and acted upon. Geoportals, digital cadastres, planning-support systems, three-dimensional city models, participation platforms, algorithms, and software ecosystems do more than make established tasks faster. They reconfigure relations among planners, publics, consultants, developers, authorities, datasets, and technologies.
DISCLOSE investigates this transformation in land-use planning and regulation. Rather than treating digitalization as a linear process of technological adoption, we examine it as a sociotechnical reorganization of planning practice. Through comparative empirical research in Europe and engagement with international sites of digital planning innovation, the project studies technologies across their development, promotion, implementation, maintenance, and everyday use.
The project brings spatial planning research into dialogue with practice research, Science and Technology Studies, and critical data studies. Despite documented awareness of digital transformation in the planning community, no theory has so far been developed to guide researchers in analyzing the digitalization of planning and supporting practitioners in navigating this transformative journey. DISCLOSE's long-term aim is to develop and test such an empirically grounded theoretical model explaining how technologies and data transform planning practice, and to provide a scientific basis for critically and constructively navigating that transformation.
Land-use planning is central to how urban regions respond to growth, climate change, housing pressures, biodiversity loss, and demands for more equitable and liveable environments. Digitalization may support more transparent, integrated, and effective planning, but it can also narrow what is recognized, obscure where consequential choices are made, and deepen dependencies on particular data and technology providers. As political pressure to adopt digital technologies intensifies, pressing questions arise about the nature of digital planning, including the extent to which the profession should, or will become computationally codified and automated with a shift toward a post-political form of planning.
By investigating these tensions empirically, DISCLOSE seeks to support neither an uncritical embrace nor a rejection of digital planning. Its contribution is to make the transformation available for informed public and professional scrutiny: to clarify what changes, for whom, through which infrastructures, and with what implications for planning knowledge, authority, and values.
Four interrelated dimensions of transformation ¶
DISCLOSE approaches digitalisation through four interrelated dimensions of planning practice. They are not separate topics or sequential stages. They form a shared analytical lens across the project’s three research lines, allowing us to compare how different technologies, organisations, and data arrangements reshape planning.
1. Encounters Planning takes place through encounters: among planners and publics, applicants and authorities, consultants and clients, and experts from different institutions. Digital portals and participation platforms can broaden access and create new forms of interaction, but they also structure who can participate, in what format, and with what effects. Interfaces therefore do not simply mediate encounters; they help produce the publics, roles, and relations that planning can recognise. Guiding question: How do digital systems enable, replace, redistribute, or format encounters—and whose voices become easier or harder to register? |
2. Discretion Planning requires situated judgement. Rules must be interpreted, evidence weighed, conflicts negotiated, and exceptions considered. Digital tools do not necessarily eliminate discretion. They may relocate it into classifications, thresholds, software defaults, automated recommendations, standards, and organisational workflows—or redistribute it among planners, developers, vendors, and data specialists. Guiding question: Where does judgement move when planning becomes digitally mediated, and how are discretion, accountability, and responsibility redistributed? |
3. Representation Planning acts through representations of territories and futures: maps, plans, models, dashboards, indicators, simulations, and visualisations. Digital representations can combine more information and support new forms of analysis, but they are selective achievements rather than neutral mirrors. Their categories, standards, resolutions, and omissions influence what can count as evidence and what can enter a decision. Guiding question: How do digital representations make places and futures knowable and actionable—and what people, qualities, uncertainties, or relations remain difficult to represent? |
4. Domain integration Land-use planning increasingly draws together environmental and social policy concerns and their associated datasets. Planning-support systems, geoportals, and analytics promise integration across land use, mobility, housing, climate, biodiversity, and other domains. Yet integration also requires translation between different knowledge practices, standards, scales, mandates, and institutional responsibilities. Guiding question: What new planning capacities emerge through domain integration, and what dependencies, frictions, or new forms of authority accompany them? |
How we investigate digital transformation: three research lines, synthesis and testing ¶
The four dimensions are investigated through three complementary research lines. Each enters the transformation from a different empirical location: everyday planning practice; the organisations that develop and promote planning technologies; and the data and algorithms through which planning objects are assembled and analysed. Their findings are then brought together in the project’s synthesis.
Research line 1 — Planning and regulation practice
Carried out by Christin Müller
How is digitalisation changing everyday planning and regulatory practice?
This research line follows digital tools in use. Through organisational ethnography in planning authorities and private planning consultancies, it examines how planners work with technologies in day-to-day situations: at their desks, in meetings, through files and platforms, and in interactions with colleagues, applicants, consultants, and publics. It asks how digital tools reorganise attention and action, alter established social and spatial relations, and reshape encounters, discretion, representation, and domain integration.
Empirical focus: planning offices and consultancies in European cities; observation and shadowing; interviews; document analysis; detailed accounts of planning and regulatory practices.
Planned contribution: a framework for assessing how digitalisation changes everyday land-use planning and regulation.
Research line 2 — Promoters of planning technologies
Carried out by Pouya Sepehr
Through which pathways do private-sector technology actors contribute to the digitalisation of planning?
Digital planning is shaped not only inside public planning authorities, but also by software companies, consultancies, vendors, developers, analysts, and intermediaries. This research line studies the products, services, business strategies, and public–private relations through which particular versions of digital planning travel. It examines how global platforms and consultancy services are adapted to local contexts, how standards and dependencies are created, and how often-invisible technical actors participate in reorganising planning knowledge and power.
Empirical focus: in-depth case studies of major software providers and international planning consultancies; interviews with actors involved in developing, customising, selling, installing, and maintaining planning technologies; analysis of corporate and technical documents and professional events.
Planned contribution: an account of the pathways through which promoters of planning technologies shape planning practice, including issues of standardisation, technological lock-in, contextual knowledge, planning imaginaries, and public–private entanglement.
Research line 3 — Data and algorithms
Carried out by Didem Türk Grigoletto
How do digital data and algorithms affect what planning can know, compare, and decide and what are their impact pathways in planning practice?
Data and algorithms do not simply pre-exist their use. They are produced through classifications, standards, institutional choices, software systems, and histories of maintenance. Drawing on critical data studies, this research line examines geoportals and digital planning data as sociotechnical arrangements. It follows how land-use plans become digitised, standardised, linked with environmental and social data, and made available for analysis, simulation, evaluation, and public access.
Empirical focus: comparative case studies of advanced European geoportals, including the Swiss Cadastre of Public-law Restrictions on Landownership and Denmark’s Plandata.dk; analysis of data types, metadata, algorithms, interoperability, access arrangements, and system development; interviews with planners, GIS specialists, database maintainers, and developers.
Planned contribution: a set of tools for researchers and practitioners to assess the effects of digital data and algorithms on planning practice.
Synthesis and Testing
Carried out by Xunran Tan
DISCLOSE brings the findings of the three research lines together through an iterative synthesis focused on the four dimensions. Interviews, observations, documents, and case analyses provide the empirical basis for developing a theoretical model of how technologies and data transform spatial planning practice. The model will describe connections among technologies, data, actors, organisations, planning processes, and outcomes, while remaining open to revising the initial concepts in response to the evidence.
The model will subsequently be evaluated through in-depth case study research and through dialogue with researchers and practitioners. The test asks whether it is empirically adequate, understandable, sufficiently general, and practically useful for reflecting on digital tools, planning values, and context-sensitive digitalisation strategies.