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The paper presents a review of contributions to the scientific discussion on modern methods and tools for public participation in urban planning. This discussion took place in Obrzycko near Poznań, Poland. The meeting was designed to allow for an ample discussion on the themes of public participatory geographic information systems, participatory geographic information systems, volunteered geographic information, citizen science, Geoweb, geographical information and communication technology, Geo-Citizen participation, geo-questionnaire, geo-discussion, GeoParticipation, Geodesign, Big Data and urban planning. Participants in the discussion were scholars from Austria, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the USA. A review of public participation in urban planning shows new developments in concepts and methods rooted in geography, landscape architecture, psychology, and sociology, accompanied by progress in geoinformation and communication technologies. The discussions emphasized that it is extremely important to state the conditions of symmetric cooperation between city authorities, urban planners and public participation representatives, social organizations, as well as residents.

The landscape of Internet mapping technologies has changed dramatically since 2005. New techniques are being used and new terms have been invented and entered the lexicon such as: mash‐ups, crowdsourcing, neogeography and geostack. A whole range of websites and communities from the commercial Google Maps to the grassroots OpenStreetMap, and applications such as Platial, also have emerged. In their totality, these new applications represent a step change in the evolution of the area of Internet geographic applications (which some have termed the GeoWeb). The nature of this change warrants an explanation and an overview, as it has implications both for geographers and the public notion of Geography. This article provides a critical review of this newly emerging landscape, starting with an introduction to the concepts, technologies and structures that have emerged over the short period of intense innovation. It introduces the non‐technical reader to them, suggests reasons for the neologism, explains the terminology, and provides a perspective on the current trends. Case studies are used to demonstrate this Web Mapping 2.0 era, and differentiate it from the previous generation of Internet mapping. Finally, the implications of these new techniques and the challenges they pose to geographic information science, geography and society at large are considered.

Heavily motorised large roads can interfere with individuals’ ability to access the goods, services, and people they need for a healthy life (‘community severance’). It also reduces the amenity value of streets as active social spaces. Interference with active living affects particularly children, denied freedom to explore and play, and older people, whose slower walking speeds limit their ability to cross roads. Despite this, there is a lack of tools to identify, measure, and study community severance caused by busy roads. This project aimed to develop a suite of tools to measure community severance, and validate the tools through triangulation of findings from different data sources.