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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Built Environ.
Sec. Urban Science
Volume 10 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fbuil.2024.1523576

Social Media for Public Participation in Urban Planning in China Based on Place Attachment--A Case of The Guangzhou Banyan Tree Incident

Provisionally accepted
Yifei Ouyang Yifei Ouyang 1,2Xiaohe Bai Xiaohe Bai 2*
  • 1 Department of Art Design and Creative Industry, Nanfang College Guangzhou, Guangzhou, China
  • 2 Faculty of Innovation and Design, City University of Macau, Macao, Macao, SAR China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Social media has become an important platform for public participation in China, given the current low level of public participation and limited channels of participation in Chinese urban planning. Taking the banyan tree relocation and felling incident in Guangzhou City as an example, this paper explores how social media-facilitated public participation can effectively influence urban planning decisions through the ambivalence analysis of public participation. It is found that place attachment may serve as a significant motivator for public participation in urban planning. Social media plays a dual role in this process. On one hand, it can improve the effectiveness of public participation in urban planning and ultimately fulfil the role of advancing democratic government decision-making. On the other hand, the paper reveals challenges such as information homogenization, emotionalized communication, and elite dominance. These issues underscore the need for further improvements in regulatory mechanisms and technical support. Therefore, future urban planning policies should take people's emotions into account, and also need to accelerate the construction of improved systems, mechanisms and technologies for social media public participation to achieve high-level public participation goals.

    Keywords: urban planning, Public Participation Events, democratic decision-making, emotional factors, place attachment

    Received: 09 Nov 2024; Accepted: 12 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Ouyang and Bai. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Xiaohe Bai, Faculty of Innovation and Design, City University of Macau, Macao, Macao, SAR China

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