From situation awareness to smart city planning and decision making

Urban planning under the current rapidly changing conditions requires holistic understanding of the planning ecosystem. Sustainable communities cannot be planned in silos, but ask for systems thinking, collaborative methods, and knowledge management. Smart city planning, or "expanded urban planning", practices are developed for framing cities from a holistic and integrative perspective as a multi-scalar and multi-dimensional endeavor. The aim of this article is to describe and discuss knowledge creation and situation awareness in collaborative urban planning practice, and the question of how digitalization changes it. These subjects are approached through a case study on an urban planning process in the metropolitan area of Helsinki, Finland. Through empirical findings, this article argues that smart city planning is not only a data-driven superlinear scaling practice, but an integrative and collaborative learning process facilitated by face-to-face interaction and advanced analyses and visualizations of available data, ongoing processes, and local history and stories.