The Use of ICT in Planning Practice: Contributions to an Effective Link between Real and Virtual Cities and Territories

The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in spatial planning is contemporary of the development of computers, and has benefited from the possibilities that ICT brought in terms of data processing and visualisation, with the development of geographical information systems (GIS) being the most successful and widespread example of this relationship. Today, there is a myriad of new ICT being developed based on the existence of a large and affordable computational capacity and on the seemingly infinite data made available. And yet, there is still (and there is scientific evidence of) a large gap between the research and development of ICT and their effective use in the professional practice in planning. In this chapter, the authors discuss the main roots of this gap and present some of the main challenges that researchers and practitioners will face to take advantage of the resources available to effectively reduce that gap.