The impact of ICT on contemporary urban planning of Surabaya City

ICT adaptation in government has become a necessity in order to realize an accountable and efficient government. However, various studies provide a pros and cons picture that the application of ICT has an impact on changes in organizational management and gives wider access to the public to participate in the decision-making process, especially in the field of urban planning. Surabaya is one of the cities in Indonesia that concerns about implementation of ICT in government organization. One of the Surabaya City government break-throughs presented by Development Planning Agency of Surabaya City, was the creation of an e-planning system as an instrument to help synchronize data collection from governments and citizens in the process of preparing urban planning in the city of Surabaya. This study aims to evaluate whether the application of e-planning has an impact on changes in organizational management, citizen empowerment, and reducing information asymmetry and trans-action costs as the result of empowering citizens through access to information on urban planning. This study applies qualitative methods by combining semi-structured interviews, observation, FGD and secondary data. This study finds that e-planning adaptation results in positive impact on improving organizational management, such as increasing transparency and accountability, knowledge management and human capital. Furthermore, e-planning implementation managed to provide more access of information in urban planning to the citizens that leads to reduce information asymmetry and transaction costs. However, ICT implementation has minimal impact on culture and change, collaboration and communication, and organisational learning. Furthermore, even though e-planning is effective in providing more access to information and a platform for the direct involvement of citizens in urban planning, it is proven that only certain groups of people who gained benefits from it. People who do not have access to the internet and lack ICT literacy are excluded from the benefits of using e-planning. In addition, e-planning implementation is also managed to reduce information asymmetry and transaction costs although at the same time increasing the potential of the occurrence of indirect costs of government organizations to implement ICT.