many to many cities.

http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html

this lecture primarily demonstrates as the shift in public media from a one-to-one (telephone) and one-to-many (newspapers, televisions, radio... ) to a many-to-many medium. and demonstrates this through the recent chinese earthquake, and the way news propogated. he says "in order for any media to become widespread, the technology needs to get boring" people using twitter, facebook, chatrooms etc have become so much the norm that we can easily put up our views on a public forum.

if we replaced media with planning. the principles are the same. ancestrally, planning has been a 'one-to-many' operation. it has come from the 'planner' to the 'people' never have we really had a dialogue. surveys and interventions are the tools we use today for feedback, but what if we had a system in place that would give us a 'feed-front' (for lack of a better term) what if we could use the open platform to get users (in this case residents of the area) to plan their own locality. essentially assuming that planning is organization of a finite number of resources within a finite area. which means it is a matter of distribution and not creation. the intangibles like the socio-cultural flavors, are better catered to by the 'non-experts' as they live and breathe the area.

in visual terms it would be like mapping a wiki over a finite area, non experts come in and edit pages, collectively they can then map the desires, fears, aspirations of the region under consideration.

thereby instead of an outsider coming/observing the region for a definite length of time and then planning for it, we could now get residents, who have been soaked
in the social fabric, to plan their own regions.

there by making the planner a medium of interpreting this directory of social desires such received, instead of the modernist version of 'god'.