Supporting Community Engagement in the City: Urban Planning in the MR-Tent

Urban design today faces complex demands. It has become a necessity to negotiate between stakeholder objectives, the expectations of citizens, and the demands of planning. In this paper we describe how we use a set of participatory technologies in combination with methods for preparing and enabling a heterogeneous group of participants to create a vision of an urban project. Our observations show how space, materials, and different types of content affect participants ’ collaboration and their debate of the urban issues. We discuss how these participatory technologies and events may help build a community of practice around an urban project