Emerging digital plan data – New research perspectives into planning practice and evaluation

Profound digitalization in public administration in many European countries is gaining momentum and spatial planning is no exception. International policies as e.g. EU’s INSPIRE directive from 2007, EU’s strategy for a digital single market or also the Arctic SDI Strategy from 2015 are driving this transformation additionally. To increase the transparency of planning and its usefulness for public and private actors as well as the general public, planning authorities make plans and related data available online. Despite the obvious potential for influencing spatial planning significantly, research on these databases is mainly
focusing on technical issues or judicial implications. Other questions related to planning practice, efficiency, evaluation and design have hardly been looked into yet, neither stated in hypotheses.
Several European countries have established different geodata and environmental / spatial) planning databases and portals. Denmark is one of the forerunners in that digitalization, e.g. with its digital plan platform “plandata.dk” which, since 2006, collects all regional, municipal and local plans in a geodatabase. This includes e.g. over 33,000 local plans which are currently effective in Denmark. In this paper, we will outline this and other plan databases in Denmark and, by way of some examples, illustrate new empirical research perspectives into planning practice and efficiency as well as the connecting land change science and spatial planning.