Advances in spatial information: new opportunities for spatial planning

This paper concerns the use of data sources in spatial planning, design, and decision making, focusing in particular on recent advances user-generated contents and enabling technologies. After a review of recent development digital data sources nowadays available to planners to support their technical activities within the plan-making process, it is argued volunteered geographic information and technology can expand the planner toolbox, enabling the seamless support to tasks that would have been cumbersome to be implemented in practice until a decade ago. A geodesign case study is described in detail in order to demonstrate these assumptions in the face of a complex design process at the metropolitan city scale