A Spatial Citizenship Approach; a Framework for Citizen Participation in Urban Planning Processes

Spatial citizenship is an approach to educate citizens in order to take advantage of modern information and communication technologies. Accordingly, a spatial citizen should be able to interpret and critically reflect on "spatial information"; communicate with the aid of maps and other "spatial representations" and to express the location-specific opinions using "Geomedia". Considering the expansion of the information and communication space, there is a pressing need to understand the features of this emerging concept and the specific strategies of participatory urban planning process based on the spatial citizenship approach. The research method in this study is descriptive and the documentary and review approaches have been used in the context of library studies, so that the contents were collected by referring to valid documents. Conceptually, spatial citizenship emanates from the individual and collective appropriation of the social space and supports individuals to obtain the necessary competencies for a way to have a more active participation in society. Spatial citizenship adds a spatial domain to citizenship education by combination of absolute, cognitive and relational concepts of space. In this approach, it is necessary to have skills and ability. The required competencies for spatial citizenship are: deconstruct the spatial information available from various sources, further ones, own visions of social space, being able to translate and communicate them with the help of geographical information. According to the case study, the proposed approach can play an effective role in the realization of strategic planning goals by educating citizens in such a way that it changes the nature of participatory urban planning.