Use of Planning Training Courses and Activities to Enhance the Understanding of Eco-Community Planning Concepts in Participatory Planning Workshop Participants: A Case Study in Taiwan

Abstract

In recent years, in order to make community planning content closer to people’s life needs and psychological expectations, and to obtain the support of the people, “citizen participatory planning” and “community-engagement” have become two important strategies of the community planning process. In this study, an indigenous people participatory planning workshop was conducted with the support of government funds, and pre-training and post-training questionnaires were completed by the participants of the planning training of the citizen participation planning. Through questionnaire analysis, this study obtained data of the participants’ cognitive status related to community planning and analyzed the basic background of the participants in order to determine the effectiveness of the planning training. According to the results of this study, most of the participating citizens had a basic understanding of the “community environment”, “the relationship between ecological knowledge and community planning”, and “community identity” before the training. Moreover, the research results also confirm that planning training can effectively enhance participants’ understanding of community planning, spatial planning, planning tools, planning laws, and the environment of the community. Additionally, planning training also contributes to the implementation of participatory decision-making and the promotion of public support for planning content. However, it is necessary to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the needs of participants, and to make appropriate adjustments to the planning training courses and activities in order to obtain stable training effectiveness and build the basic ability of citizens with respect to participatory planning.

Participatory Environmentally Friendly Message Design: Influence of Message Features and User Characteristics

“…'Participatory' refers to the provision of opportunities for people to participate, and 'consultation' is the act of talking about something that is being decided with another person or a group of people in the form of a speech or piece of writing, which provides information, ideas, and opinions about something [5]. Recently, attention has been directed to the integration and involvement of users in the conceptual design process, also known as participatory design [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. With user participation in the process of information design, the intended messages are more likely to be better conveyed and understood [16,17].…”