How has digital participatory mapping influenced urban planning: Views from nine planning cases from Finland

Although the successfulness of public participation projects has been studied from many different perspectives, there is a lack of knowledge of how participation influences the planning outcomes. Through the interview study of nine Finnish urban planning projects, we studied how the use of a digital public participation GIS tool has influenced the outcomes of urban planning. In the selected cases the information collected with a PPGIS tool has been highly valued by the planners, leading to concretely influential participation in 6 out of 9 cases. In these cases, the planners gave concrete examples of how the information had influenced the created plan or draft. We created a model that describes how the information produced by participants is traveling from the participants to the outcome of the planning process. With this model, the main factors limiting the degree of influence were recognized, and actions were presented that could increase the influence. •67% of cases showed PPGIS concretely influencing planning outcomes.•Planners highly valued information collected with PPGIS.•PPGIS can enhance data representativeness, equality, and quality.•Better data management practices could improve the influence of participation.