Digitalization, Participation and Interaction: Towards More Inclusive Tools in Urban Design—A Literature Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to read the paper. After I read the paper I have some suggestions:
The introduction needs a restructuration it is very unorganized.
I don’t find any clear objectives ore hypothesis. 
The research methodology is not very clear. 
After the figures and table, you must comment and describe them. 
The discussion part is not connected to the existing literature.
The conclusion needs to be extended and present the theoretical, practical and managerial implication and also some limitations are welcome.
Good luck!

Author Response

REV 1

Thank you for the opportunity to read the paper. After I read the paper I have some suggestions:

It is our privilege to receive and try to address your constructive suggestions. They will largely contribute to improving the quality of the study.

1) The introduction needs a restructuration it is very unorganized. I don’t find any clear objectives ore hypothesis. 

We reviewed various aspects of the introduction. It is now divided into 2 sections: 1) Introduction – it is a description of the study in its context. 2) Is dedicated to a review and the finding of themes that guide the study. It will increase the links to the methodology section. We also added a gap description and research question at the end of the section

2) The research methodology is not very clear. 

We made a series of improvements including graphics and their captions and a more comprehensive description of the variables employed in the study.

3) After the figures and table, you must comment and describe them. 

Thank you for the comment it makes a lot of sense. We improved all captions of tables and figures adding more detailed descriptions. I hope they are now easier to understand.

4) The discussion part is not connected to the existing literature.

We reformulated it, adding citations of studies to strengthen the argumentation.

5) The conclusion needs to be extended and present the theoretical, practical and managerial implication and also some limitations are welcome.

Limitations and outlooks of the research have been added. Also, possible impacts of the research on the field.

Good luck!

Thank you again for the helpful critiques. We hope we could address all the points raised

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Author(s),

The article is interesting and the study brings up some important issues.

However, the manuscript requires some improvements.

1.The working hypotheses need to be formulated very clearly in order to finally highlight whether these hypotheses have been verified.

2.Table 1 - Matrix of correlations, no patterns identified- needs more explanations.

3. It should be explained what the Spearman correlation is and why it was used in this study.

4.The insertion in the results chapter of some of the digital tools found in the references would have been an important argument in support of the statement in the Discussion, namely, "the tools used in the field should become more sophisticated".

5.The conclusions are very general and do not refer to the results of the research. Also, the conclusions should point to the strengths and weaknesses of the conducted analyses, suggest further directions of research.

6. Minor editorial errors were also found: the table in rows 282-283 should have an explanatory heading; the sentence between lines 362 and 366 is repeated immediately after it.

Best regards.

Author Response

The article is interesting and the study brings up some important issues.

Thank you for your very constructive comments we tried to address them accordingly.

However, the manuscript requires some improvements.

1.The working hypotheses need to be formulated very clearly in order to finally highlight whether these hypotheses have been verified.

We added a paragraph at the end of the introduction where the gap, question and hypothesis are formulated. Also, at the discussion, we both identified that many aspects of the hypothesis (assumptions) are not matched and further proposed how to overcome the lack.

2.Table 1 - Matrix of correlations, no patterns identified- needs more explanations.

We improved the descriptions of all captions.

3. It should be explained what the Spearman correlation is and why it was used in this study.

Good advice. We added this description in the methodology section, subsection statistical analysis.

4.The insertion in the results chapter of some of the digital tools found in the references would have been an important argument in support of the statement in the Discussion, namely, "the tools used in the field should become more sophisticated".

We proceeded as suggested. That in fact helped to largely illustrate the argumentation in the discussion. Some examples of studies have been added and commented.

5.The conclusions are very general and do not refer to the results of the research. Also, the conclusions should point to the strengths and weaknesses of the conducted analyses, suggest further directions of research.

We improved the conclusion by adding limitations of the study and outlook for future research. Also, we discuss possible ways to overcome the shortages in the field since the initial assumptions could not be validated.

6. Minor editorial errors were also found: the table in rows 282-283 should have an explanatory heading; the sentence between lines 362 and 366 is repeated immediately after it.

Fixed!

Best regards.

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors.

Thank you for contributing to this important topic of planning research. However, before publishing, the article needs to be improved and refined in many ways.

First of all, I must unfortunately state that its formal arrangement is terrible. There are several fonts used, a huge number of shortcomings in English grammar and inappropriately used, or unexplained terms, missing breaks, but most importantly, unfinished sentences and typos. Please re-read the entire article and correct it carefully. You leave a text from the template at the beginning of the chapters. The overall readability of the article must be improved. Some citations are out of parentheses.

Introduction

To be honest, sometimes I found very difficult to understand the authors' thoughts due to the large volume of typos, or unproper stylistic of sentences. You need to clearly define what you understand by "urban design". It is not clear from the introduction whether you specify the given types of workshops in the context of development planning, spatial planning, architecture aspects of urban planning. If the use of these tools is meant generally for "planning", the terminology needs to be unified. Also, the concept of workshop needs to be better defined - it is just one way to secure joint communication and decision-making in the planning process. But you don't mention others. Where did the classification of the three types of workshops came from? Are you citing other authors, or it is a result of review? The introduction is then divided into three parts according to the type of workshop and describes the various aspects of digitization, participation and interaction. However, a general introduction to the issue at the beginning of the introduction chapter is missing.

You mention several methods, such as storytelling, use of AR technology, etc. which would need to be better specified. When are they applied in the case of physical, online and mixed workshops? It is necessary to provide an overview of the methods described in the introduction and to present a framework for their use in various types of workshops and plans. What are the possibilities of using these methods and tools? How large communities can participate if these are used? Within what types of planning we can utilize the given types of workshops and methods? It is possible to shorten the introduction, as the scope gives the impression of describing the results of a systematic review - which belong to the results.

At the end of the introduction chapter, it is necessary to build a links to the methodology chapter. I recommend adding a final paragraph in which you link the main findings from the literature and the knowledge gap with the research design for your study.

Methodology

The methodology of the study must be better specified. Although its structure and sub-chapters are appropriate, the whole research design is explained quite confusingly. Authors should better justify what type of knowledge the literature review wants to bring, what type of systematic literary review study represents. Filtering with a combination of three keywords built on the following terms has deprived you of a number of articles that could be very helpful for your review. In the future, I recommend using more combinations or filtering in the wos and scopus databases. I also do not recommend filtering by the number of citations in the future, as the latest interesting sources of literature was unnecessarily omitted. You, write: "This brings the total number of papers published during the 5 years to 62" (289) - why do you filter studies for 5 years? What years are these?

You state that the classification of workshops is a result of a review - but this was not reflected in other chapters of the manuscript, and if so, it should be stated in the introduction to make it clear to the reader. Since the research framework was not precisely defined in the beginning of the chapter or at the end of the introduction, in the "Categorization" section I only realized what type of study it actually is. The method of evaluation of individual studies is probably subjective scoring in three selected areas: level of digitization, level of participation and level of interaction. The authors specified what the 1-2-3 score represents, but the way the scoring was awarded definitely needs a more detailed description. What is e.g. low, medium and high digitality?

Results

In the results, the authors look for the relationship between level of digitization, level of participation and level of interaction. However, these categories or aspects of planning do not suggest any pattern of interrelationship. If an article should have the potential for citation, it must really bring some knowledge to the research question:

- „How“ digital tools facilitate the interaction of citizens in collaborative design workshops for urban design?

If only a relationship was sought, I suggest removing "how" from the research question. I am sorry, but for at least the 20 studies in the summary table in chapter Results (I note that in the methodology chapter you claim that the last round of filtering resulted to 21 studies - line 291), you must try to evaluate, at least through routine comparison and interpretation of results, how In particular, the use of digital tools encouraged interaction between participants in the planning process. At what stages? What types of interactions have arisen as a result of using these tools? Certainly, the results of the study would be enriched by delivering the comprehensive overview of such digital tools from individual studies.

Discussion is not confronting your results with the results of other authors, what I consider to be one of main problems of manuscript too. The conclusions are brief, do not provide a sufficient answer to the main research question, and there are no limitations and suggestions for further research declared.

Author Response

Thank you for contributing to this important topic of planning research. However, before publishing, the article needs to be improved and refined in many ways.

First of all, I must unfortunately state that its formal arrangement is terrible. There are several fonts used, a huge number of shortcomings in English grammar and inappropriately used, or unexplained terms, missing breaks, but most importantly, unfinished sentences and typos. Please re-read the entire article and correct it carefully. You leave a text from the template at the beginning of the chapters. The overall readability of the article must be improved. Some citations are out of parentheses.

Thank you for your patience and the time dedicated to reviewing the article. We made a comprehensive proofreading to exclude the problems mentioned. We hope that the readability has been increased and achieved a satisfactory level.

 

Introduction

To be honest, sometimes I found very difficult to understand the authors' thoughts due to the large volume of typos, or unproper stylistic of sentences. You need to clearly define what you understand by "urban design". It is not clear from the introduction whether you specify the given types of workshops in the context of development planning, spatial planning, architecture aspects of urban planning. If the use of these tools is meant generally for "planning", the terminology needs to be unified.

Additional to the aforementioned improvements, we tried to follow a more consistent terminology.

Also, the concept of workshop needs to be better defined - it is just one way to secure joint communication and decision-making in the planning process. But you don't mention others. Where did the classification of the three types of workshops came from? Are you citing other authors, or it is a result of review? The introduction is then divided into three parts according to the type of workshop and describes the various aspects of digitization, participation and interaction. However, a general introduction to the issue at the beginning of the introduction chapter is missing.

You mention several methods, such as storytelling, use of AR technology, etc. which would need to be better specified. When are they applied in the case of physical, online and mixed workshops? It is necessary to provide an overview of the methods described in the introduction and to present a framework for their use in various types of workshops and plans. What are the possibilities of using these methods and tools? How large communities can participate if these are used? Within what types of planning we can utilize the given types of workshops and methods? It is possible to shorten the introduction, as the scope gives the impression of describing the results of a systematic review - which belong to the results.

At the end of the introduction chapter, it is necessary to build a links to the methodology chapter. I recommend adding a final paragraph in which you link the main findings from the literature and the knowledge gap with the research design for your study.

The classification of the types of workshops are themes that emerged from the literature review. Also, the introduction has been extended and re-structured. We hope that the concepts are clearer now. We added a paragraph at the end explaining the gap. We also added a matrix containing all variables and descriptions of methods used during the workshops – however, for the sake of fluidity this table was relocated to the appendix section.

 

Methodology

The methodology of the study must be better specified. Although its structure and sub-chapters are appropriate, the whole research design is explained quite confusingly. Authors should better justify what type of knowledge the literature review wants to bring, what type of systematic literary review study represents. Filtering with a combination of three keywords built on the following terms has deprived you of a number of articles that could be very helpful for your review. In the future, I recommend using more combinations or filtering in the wos and scopus databases. I also do not recommend filtering by the number of citations in the future, as the latest interesting sources of literature was unnecessarily omitted. You, write: "This brings the total number of papers published during the 5 years to 62" (289) - why do you filter studies for 5 years? What years are these?

We filtered a few articles with higher number of citations to make sure that highly influential papers that are older than the time limit are still considered. After identifying these studies, we dismissed the filtering by citations and proceeded only with a time constrain. That means that no studies have been left out by the number of citations, but we managed to include what can be considered seminal studies which are maybe older than 10 years or so.

You state that the classification of workshops is a result of a review - but this was not reflected in other chapters of the manuscript, and if so, it should be stated in the introduction to make it clear to the reader.

We added this explanation in the Intro section.

Since the research framework was not precisely defined in the beginning of the chapter or at the end of the introduction, in the "Categorization" section I only realized what type of study it actually is. The method of evaluation of individual studies is probably subjective scoring in three selected areas: level of digitization, level of participation and level of interaction. The authors specified what the 1-2-3 score represents, but the way the scoring was awarded definitely needs a more detailed description. What is e.g. low, medium and high digitality?

It is very true! We have elaborated that explanations in the methodology section.

Results

In the results, the authors look for the relationship between level of digitization, level of participation and level of interaction. However, these categories or aspects of planning do not suggest any pattern of interrelationship. If an article should have the potential for citation, it must really bring some knowledge to the research question:

„How“ digital tools facilitate the interaction of citizens in collaborative design workshops for urban design?

If only a relationship was sought, I suggest removing "how" from the research question.I am sorry, but for at least the 20 studies in the summary table in chapter Results (I note that in the methodology chapter you claim that the last round of filtering resulted to 21 studies - line 291), you must try to evaluate, at least through routine comparison and interpretation of results, how In particular, the use of digital tools encouraged interaction between participants in the planning process. At what stages? What types of interactions have arisen as a result of using these tools? Certainly, the results of the study would be enriched by delivering the comprehensive overview of such digital tools from individual studies

 

Discussion is not confronting your results with the results of other authors, what I consider to be one of main problems of manuscript too. The conclusions are brief, do not provide a sufficient answer to the main research question, and there are no limitations and suggestions for further research declared.

While processing the sample we felt necessary to aggregate the results to establish the correlations necessary for the scope of the study. Although we agree with the proposal, we believe we would not be capable to execute it within the same design. We proposed to address the problem in the outlook description we added in the conclusion. We also extended the discussion section adding citations of other studies to illustrate and strengthen the link between the argumentation and the sources.

 

We are very grateful for the scrutiny of the comments. Hoping that the next version can address the main points raised.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

 

Thank you very much for the revised version. You make several changes, but I have some minor aspects that must be do before publication:

Please verify the references and reference style according to the journal.

Please mention all table and figure in the text.

Supplementary references that maybe help you:

Akram, U., Fülöp, M. T., Tiron-Tudor, A., Topor, D. I., & Căpușneanu, S. (2021). Impact of digitalization on customers’ well-being in the pandemic period: Challenges and opportunities for the retail industry. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(14), 7533.

Gallego, A., & Kurer, T. (2022). Automation, Digitalization, and Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace: Implications for Political Behavior. Annual Review of Political Science, 25.

Căpușneanu, S., Mateș, D., Tűrkeș, M. C., Barbu, C. M., Staraș, A. I., Topor, D. I., ... & Fülöp, M. T. (2021). The Impact of Force Factors on the Benefits of Digital Transformation in Romania. Applied Sciences, 11(5), 2365.

Good luck!

Author Response

Thank you very much for the revised version. You make several changes, but I have some minor aspects that must be do before publication:

Please verify the references and reference style according to the journal.

Fixed!

Please mention all table and figures in the text.

We checked for missing references and updated accordingly

Supplementary references that maybe help you:

Thank you for the suggestion. We added some of the suggested refs to the discussion part.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Author(s),

I'm glad you took into account the suggestions I made. The results and conclusions of the study are much clearer.

Best regards.

Author Response

Thank you for contributing to the study with your review!

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors,

Article was improved indeed since previous round of review. I still have some suggestions for further improvement.

I suggest to correct some expressions throughout the article:

Line 38 „studies based on their level 38 of digitalization“ I would rather say „level of planning process digitalization in the study“.

Line 41 „and related themes“ – I would rather use „and identified broader levels of these variables“.

As required in the past, definition of workshops improved significantly. The overall readability in the sub chapters "level of participation", "level of digitization" and "level of interaction" has also improved. However, I now turn to my main comment on the manuscript at this stage. Introduction sections in scientific articles do not serve for presenting the in-depth literature review results, nor basic "theory background overview". I highly recommend dividing the chapter "Results" into chapters 3.1. "Participation, digitalization and interaction in planning workshops" a 3.2. "Correlation between participation, digitalization and interaction in empirical studies". Thus, I recommend to move content from lines 49-259 to results, as I believe, that this overview can be rather understood as result of literature review.

Line 28 – 44 part of the introduction (including table 1) should be enriched by a brief description of each level of participation in the Arnstein ladder and a brief explanation of the levels of digitization and participation. Please leave the research gap at the end of the chapter. It would be appropriate to substantiate its claim in it by reference to a source or by a link to previous research. In this form, I consider the Introduction chapter to be appropriate.

I consider the shortcomings in the Materials and Methods chapter to be resolved.

I still see some potential for minor improvement of chapter Discussion, as you results can be better confronted with other review articles – I suggest to chcek several sources, that can be of use for you:

https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/9/1/49

https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/11/1/19

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9358548

 

Thank you for your effort to process my comments.

Author Response

Dear authors,

Article was improved indeed since previous round of review. I still have some suggestions for further improvement.

Thank you!

I suggest to correct some expressions throughout the article:

Line 38 „studies based on their level 38 of digitalization“ I would rather say „level of planning process digitalization in the study“.

ok

Line 41 „and related themes“– I would rather use „and identified broader levels of these variables“.

As required in the past, definition of workshops improved significantly. The overall readability in the sub chapters "level of participation", "level of digitization" and "level of interaction" has also improved.

However, I now turn to my main comment on the manuscript at this stage. Introduction sections in scientific articles do not serve for presenting the in-depth literature review results, nor basic "theory background overview". I highly recommend dividing the chapter "Results" into chapters 3.1. "Participation, digitalization and interaction in planning workshops" a 3.2. "Correlation between participation, digitalization and interaction in empirical studies".

 

Thus, I recommend to move content from lines 49-259 to results, as I believe, that this overview can be rather understood as result of literature review.

Esteemed reviewer. I tend to agree with the suggestion. However, it would generate conflicts with other reviewer suggestions at this point.

 

Line 28 – 44 part of the introduction (including table 1) should be enriched by a brief description of each level of participation in the Arnstein ladder and a brief explanation of the levels of digitization and participation. Please leave the research gap at the end of the chapter. It would be appropriate to substantiate its claim in it by reference to a source or by a link to previous research. In this form, I consider the Introduction chapter to be appropriate.

Description added to the introduction.

 

I consider the shortcomings in the Materials and Methods chapter to be resolved.

 

I still see some potential for minor improvement of chapter Discussion, as you results can be better confronted with other review articles – I suggest checking several sources, that can be of use for you:

https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/9/1/49

https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/11/1/19

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9358548

 We also added some material to the discussion part

We thank you again for your detailed comments. We addressed as much as we could considering some constraints of time and within the requests from multiple reviewers.

 

We sincerely that this time the article has reached an acceptable standard.

 

Our best wishes.