Crowdsourcing 2.0 refers to
mass collaboration in which Web 2.0 technologies and services are utilized. In
the context of urban panning, it includes such forms as wikipalnning,
co-alerting, various forms of Web-assisted co-creation as well as participatory
budgeting and crowdfunding. This mini-article clarifies the idea with a focus
on wikiplanning, interactive websites, information platforms, participatory
sensing, and co-creation. (Discussion is based on Anttiroiko, 2015).
Introduction
Web 2.0-based crowdsourcing
platforms, applications, and services can be used to generate collective
intelligence in urban planning (on crowdsourcing platforms and applications,
see Doan et al., 2011). Crowdsourcing can smarten up various collective
activities. Brabham (2013), for example, has proposed a problem-based typology
of crowdsourcing approaches: (a) Knowledge discovery and management: mobilizing
a crowd to find and assemble information, as in the case of creating collective
resources; (b) Distributed human intelligence tasking: mobilizing a crowd to
process or analyze information, such as large and diverse data sets not
amenable to computer analysis; (c) Broadcast search or scientific problem
solving: mobilizing a crowd to come up with a solution to a problem with an an
objective, verifiable right answer; and (d) Peer-vetted creative production:
mobilizing a crowd to come up with a solution to a problem with an answer that
is subjective or dependent on public support - a category associated with
design, esthetic, planning, and policy problems. In city planning the last
aspect dominates, and a good example of this is wikiplanning.
From a more planning-oriented
view we may consider the basic planning functions and assess the potential of
Web 2.0-assisted crowdsourcing. Let us consider the following functions of a
comprehensive planning process:
- Identifying issues: people may identify problems of
the city, e.g. crowd ideation and involving citizens in problem identification.
- Stating goals: people expressing their ideas about
the goals for city planning and the future of the city, e.g. wikiplanning.
- Collecting data: people can help in alert messaging,
reporting, and collecting data, e.g. crowdsourced information platforms and
mapping.
- Preparing the plan: people can contribute to the
writing of the plan and designing solutions, e.g. wikiplanning, user-generated
content creation, and mapping for the crowd.
- Evaluating alternatives: people can vote for or set
priorities on alternatives or participate in scientific deliberative polling.
- Implementing the plan: people can assist in
implementing a plan as co-creators and co-funders.
- Monitoring the plan: people may monitor and follow
up the realization of the plan through crowdsourcing tools.
Such a range of Web 2.0
services and tools that can be applied to various planning functions
illustrates the huge potential of crowdsourcing in urban planning. Next we
elaborate this topic further. To structure the discussion let us rely on
inductive categorization of the types of crowdsourcing derived from real-life
cases in urban planning, which resemble the categories presented above. Discussion
focuses on three forms of crowdsourcing 2.0: wikiplanning, informational
crowdsourcing (co-alerting), and various forms of co-creation.
Wikiplanning and interactive websites
The first group of cases to be
discussed is town planning exercises, which use content sharing and teamwork
tools, such as wikis. A pioneering case of wikiplanning is Future Melbourne
Wiki and Blog at http://www.futuremelbourne.com.au/wiki/view/FMPlan. The City
of Melbourne, Australia, used wikis in 2008 to attract comments, to generate
discussion, and to enable registered citizens to edit the content of the Future
Melbourne draft plan. The City was possibly the first of its kind in the
category of big cities to enter a new era of online community consultation
focusing on large-scale city planning with the help of wikis.
Another pioneering case was
the wikiplanning project of the City of San José, California, in conjunction
with drafting the city’s general plan in 2009. It aimed at soliciting user
input on the future of the city through a Web-based wiki. The core method for
eliciting citizens’ views was a 19-question survey, which gathered citizen
input in order to guide city officials making development decisions under the
Envision San Jose 2040 plan. The survey was open to anyone at http://www.wikiplanning.org/. In addition
to the survey, users were also able to post photos of elements from San Jose they liked or
disliked. And if a user had seen something in another city that might be a good
addition to San Jose,
he or she could add photos of it or discuss it on a community message board.
Citizens had also access to project data, background information, maps,
PowerPoint presentations, and videos on city planning and sustainability.
Besides utilizing collective intelligence through citizen participation and
increasing the number of participants in the city planning process,
wikiplanning was assumed to affect the composition of participants by
attracting newcomers and especially younger citizens (Vander Veen, 2009;
Bruensteiner, 2009).
Even if not literally
wiki-based urban planning, there are hundreds of town planning cases where
contributions from local inhabitants have been solicited. For example, the city
of Bristol, Connecticut, set up a ‘Bristol Rising’ initiative with the idea of
turning the city’s decaying downtown back into a thriving destination with a
vibrant, walkable, contiguous experience. Residents were invited to upload
their own ideas and join in discussions at the website so that developers could
gauge exactly what the community wanted (See the site at
http://www.bristolrising.com/). A similar project in New York starts with the question, “How can
we make our city a better place to live?” Community members were invited to
submit ideas at the ‘Change by Us NYC’ website (http://nyc.changeby.us/), where
a network of city leaders read and considered each proposal. Successful
projects operational in 2013 included a new community garden and greenhouse.
Suggested improvements also included cleaning and repairing existing bike
lanes, new pedestrian bridges, composting locations, and discounts on Citi Bike
memberships for low-income residents. The third example worth special mention
is My Ideal City (http://www.miciudadideal.com/en/), collaboration between
several partners to redevelop the city of Bogota,
Colombia,
based on user input. The concept has certain peculiar features. First and
foremost, the project organizes a half-year period of conversation through W
Radio in Bogota
and PSFK.com globally on trends around the future of the city, in Spanish and
English respectively. Every week both parties discuss the same topic, on which
audiences are asked to comment via Twitter or the project website. The
responses are gathered and reviewed later by two experts working on a plan to
redevelop a neighborhood in downtown Bogota
(Fawkes, 2013; WebUrbanist, 2014).
Lastly, several
planning-oriented crowdsourcing initiatives find their realization through
commercially available citizen engagement platforms. A good example is
Mindmixer, a platform that offers community leaders a chance to crowdsource
ideas, pool assets and manage feedback (http://www.mindmixer.com/). Another
case is Spigit software deployed by two US
counties, Harford County, Maryland,
and Maricopa County, Arizona, to gather ideas from citizens to
make productivity gains and reduce costs. A similar community-based idea
management system developed by Spigit was adopted by the City of Manor, Texas,
in 2009. The project created an open innovation platform called Manor Labs
as a common space for citizens to share their ideas on how to improve city operations
(Vander Veen, 2010; Mergel, 2013; Mergel & Greeves, 2013).
Information platforms and participatory sensing
Crowdsourcing 2.0 has proved
to be particularly useful in reporting problems. Such Web 2.0 applications and
services can be used in the planning processes when identifying problem sites,
disseminating information, learning from other cities, and generating
development ideas. We could call these jointly informational or even ‘instant’
crowdsourcing. A paradigmatic case is New Urban Mechanics, an idea embraced by
Tom Menino, Mayor of Boston to use technology for addressing the everyday
problems of citizens. A showcase for their work is based on crowdsourcing via
the use of smartphone-based applications available to citizens to alert
officials about street-level problems in the city’s neighborhoods, such as
complaints about potholes. In general, the phone + camera + GPS, all in one
smart device, can make a revolution in such an instant crowdsourcing (Townsend,
2013, pp. 212-214; Goldsmith, 2010). It is close to the idea of participatory
sensing, which empowers ordinary citizens to collect and share sensed data from
their surrounding environments using their mobile phones (Kanhere, 2013).
Crowdsourced information
platforms are changing the top-down nature of how news, opinions and complaints
are gathered and disseminated by placing reporting tools in the hands of
citizens. A case that takes us closer to the reality of urban planning is a
project developed by the Beijing
Transport Research
Center and the World Bank
aiming to find out to which areas transportation planners should be paying
special attention. Anyone can submit a mini report on issues related to cycling
and walking infrastructure through the website, smart phone applications, SMS,
or social media. These user-generated reports are then mapped and visualized,
and made available for public discussion (WebUrbanist, 2014).
Another somewhat similar
snapshot is Place Pulse (http://pulse.media.mit.edu/), which aims to ascertain
through user participation what makes a place feel safe, vibrant, active,
unique, central, or family friendly. The site presents images side-by-side and
asks users to rate them with questions like “Which place looks more beautiful?”
The images are from cities around the world and provide researchers with data
that can be used to study the association between urban perception and datasets
like violent crime, creativity, and economic growth (WebUrbanist, 2014). To
generalize, information platform-based crowdsourcing is a powerful tool for
rating, comparing, and benchmarking the aspects of urban conditions,
functionality, esthetics, and development.
Various forms of co-creation
Many Web 2.0 applications
invite people to create their own drawings, videos or mockups to support a
planning process. An illustrative prototype is Streetmix
(http://streetmix.net/), an interactive street section builder that helps
community members mockup the streets by modifying a street design template and
presenting the results of their work as future plans for city planners (Miller,
2013). Another interesting pilot was Next Stop Design, a co-production website,
which was part of a research project called “Crowdsourcing Public Participation
in Transit Planning” active in 2009-2010. It was set up to find new ways of
involving people as alternatives to traditional open meetings and workshops.
This particular case had two rounds, of which the first was about letting
citizens design bus shelters for the university campus in Salt
Lake City and the second about dealing with the planning of an
intersection in the Sugar House neighborhood of Salt Lake City. The project was a joint
effort of the University
of Utah and the Utah
Transit Authority. (See Next Stop Design at http://www.nextstopdesign.com/).
To the category of
co-creation-oriented crowdsourcing for the built environment we may also add
CitiNiche from Australia,
an online property development platform launched by a team of architecture,
planning and digital technology professionals. The idea behind the project is
to use crowdsourcing to develop proposals and attract potential
owner-occupiers to residential properties, i.e., participants subscribe to
“niches” matching their property preferences and enter further ideas for their
ideal dwelling (see http://www.citiniche.com.au/). (Ward, 2013).
Betaville brings people
together in the name of online gaming. This is an open-source multiplayer
environment for real cities, in which ideas for new works of public art, architecture,
urban design, and development can be shared, discussed, tweaked, and brought to
maturity. It enables the public to visualize planned buildings that are to be
built and also to collaborate or give feedback on urban planning (see
http://betaville.net/). It started in New
York City and has since expanded internationally
(WebUrbanist, 2014). Another real-life planning game was known as Participatory
Chinatown and launched in 2010. This was a 3-D immersive role-playing game
designed to be part of the master planning process for Boston's
Chinatown area
(http://www.participatorychinatown.org/).
An important form of
co-creative crowdsourcing utilizes geographical information and mapping.
Hudson-Smith, Batty, Crooks and Milton
(2009), for instance, have described how to harness the power of Web 2.0
technologies to create new approaches to collecting, mapping, and sharing
geocoded data. There are applications like MapTube, GMapCreator, Image Cutter
and PhotoOverlay Creator that let users make thematic maps, display images on
the maps, and view, share, and mash maps online. An
illustrative example is MapTube, which allows users to
create new maps from scratch using a combination of crowdsourcing,
crowdcasting, and broadcasting (http://www.maptube.org/). Another interesting
case is the Ushahidi online mapping platform, which can be used for monitoring
elections, pooling local resources, and mapping crisis information (see
http://ushahidi.com/products/crowdmap/). Such tools contribute to our
understanding of the opportunities provided by neogeography or ‘mapping for the
masses’ (see Hudson-Smith, Crooks, Gibin, Milton & Batty, 2009; Haklay et
al., 2008). In general, even if real-life cases of GeoWeb 2.0 in urban planning
are still rare, combining crowdsourcing with geospatial intelligence has
undeniable potential to smarten up urban planning practices. It is possible
that a decisive impetus to the incorporation of such intelligence into planning
comes through the increased use of tablets and smartphones (Leinbach et al.,
2012; Allen et al., 2011).
Some relevant crowdsourcing
applications and practices can be found in social or collaborative tagging (see
Yi, 2012). In its paradigmatic form tagging allows users to add and change not
only content (data), but content describing content (metadata). Users may tag basically any digital objects. In the
libraries, for example, they may tag a library’s collections and thereby
participate in the cataloguing process. Social bookmarking is another form of tagging, as in collecting Web site
tips in Delicious
or locating, organizing, and
sharing one’s favorite online resources in PennTags at
http://tags.library.upenn.edu/ (Maness, 2006; Lankes et al., 2007). Another form of social crowdsourcing based on tagging is the creation of
folksonomies, i.e. classification
systems created in a bottom-up fashion without central coordination. The result
is a tag cloud that presents an aggregation of people’s usage or views rather
than a systematic analysis of the structure of the given activity area (Lankes et al., 2007, p. 21;
Anttiroiko & Savolainen, 2011; Casey & Sevastinuk 2006, 41). A special
form of tagging worth mentioning is conversational tagging, which became
popular through the use of hashtags (#) in Twitter. It does not create indexes
for later retrieval but rather is motivated by attracting attention and making
the message to appear in certain discourses or streams, as in the case of
Twitter’s short-lived emergent topics known as micro-memes (Huang et al.,
2010). Many of the projects around the world have substantiated the claim that
people can significantly benefit the work of knowledge institutions and
processes if organized in Web 2.0 style (Tay,
2009). The implications of such cases for urban planning are obvious. The
experiences in commenting, rating, and tagging can serve communication,
analysis, evaluation, and wrapping-up in the planning process.
Epilogue
There is a plethora of
examples of how Web 2.0 tools can be applied to urban planning. However,
experiences in Urban Planning 2.0 are so far thin and true breakthroughs and
killer applications are still fairly few. Nevertheless, their potential to
enhance various forms of social intelligence is undeniable. One of the areas
that have clearly shown potential is the ability of Web 2.0 tools to support
crowdsourcing, which is a primary method that generates collective
intelligence. The cases discussed earlier in this chapter, most notably such as
wikiplanning in Melbourne and Palo Alto, are indications of the potential
to increase intelligence in urban planning via Web 2.0. Yet much remains to be
learned about the preconditions for the realization of such potential. Besides,
wikiplanning is only the tip of the iceberg of activities which have a
potential for smartening up urban planning. The precondition for optimal enhancement
of Web 2.0-assisted intelligence is the understanding of social and cultural
dimension of the deployment of new ICTs. The other important element, which is
critical to collective intelligence in particular, is the appreciation of
diversity (Surowiecki, 2005). After learning from various facets of Web-enabled
social intelligence in urban planning, the next step is to consider the need for
their integration, which may pave the way for a new role of artificial
intelligence and even technological singularity in urban planning, which may eventually
profoundly change the way we plan and develop our cities.
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* * *
This mini-article is a slightly modified excerpt from: Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko(2015) Smart Planning: The Potential of Web 2.0 for Enhancing CollectiveIntelligence in Urban Planning. In: Carlos Nunes Silva (Ed.) Emerging Issues,Challenges, and Opportunities in Urban E-Planning. Hershey, PA:IGI Global, pp. 1-32.
