  Challenges in spatial planning include adjusting settlement patterns to
increasing or shrinking populations; it also includes organizing food delivery
in rural and peripheral environments. Discourse typically starts with an open
problem and the search for a holistic and innovative solution. Software will
often be needed to implement the innovation. Spatial planning problems are
characterized by large and heterogeneous groups of stakeholders, such as
municipalities, companies, interest groups, citizens, women and men, young
people and children. Current techniques for participation are slow, laborious
and costly, and they tend to miss out on many stakeholders or interest groups.
We propose a triple shift in perspective: (1) Discourse is reframed as a
requirements process with the explicit goal to state software, hardware, and
organizational requirements. (2) Due to the above-mentioned characteristics of
spatial planning problems, we suggest using techniques of requirements
engineering (RE) and CrowdRE for getting stakeholders (e.g. user groups)
involved. (3) We propose video as a medium for communicating problems, solution
alternatives, and arguments effectively within a mixed crowd of officials,
citizens, children and elderly people. Although few spatial planning problems
can be solved by software alone, this new perspective helps to focus
discussions anyway. RE techniques can assist in finding common ground despite
the heterogeneous group of stakeholders, e.g. citizens. Digital requirements
and video are well-suited for facilitating distribution, feedback, and
discourse via the internet. In this paper, we propose this new perspective as a
timely opportunity for the spatial planning domain - and as an increasingly
important application domain of CrowdRE.
