The planning of built and natural environments incorporates participatory processes that are more and more supported by information and communications technology (ICT). On the one hand, this implies potentially more diverse knowledge of the masses in form of participatory contributions, e. g., opinions, ideas or formal statements. On the other hand, this leads to an increasing data complexity in terms of size and interconnectedness which in turn complicates making sense, retrieving implicit new information, and decision making. We describe the need for more sophisticated methods and present how the field of visual analytics can overcome these challenges by demonstrating the applicability of the visual analytics process model for one exemplary but fundamental use case that focuses on an analysis task in e-participation for planning purposes.