Digital tools as a means to foster citizen involvement in urban planning

Stéphanie Aline Hasler
2017
Poster talk

Abstract

Based mainly on sensors, flow optimization and algorithms, the smart city model has revealed its limits. The city’s smart citizens are scarcely included in the planning process, even though they occupy a key position to produce and share valuable knowledge on how they live and use the city. Technology has the potential to generate tools that improve interaction and information exchange between urban planners and city dwellers, which is a key aspect for more sustainable and responsive planning. This lunchtalk will explore how digital tools can be harnessed to create new means of involving citizens in the urban planning process, and how they integrate a non-expert but practiced layer of knowledge. By looking at numerous existing tools, it will examine the opportunities and limitations of these digital technologies as a way to create novel planning practices

Official source

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/230296?ln=en

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Related publications (10)

Digital tools and citizen participation: Towards sustainable and responsive urban planning

Jérôme Chenal, Stéphanie Aline Hasler, Marc Soutter

The smart city concept has existed for decades now. It was presented as a response to help cities cope with challenges they were facing such as rapid urbanization, climate change, resource depletion, and sustainability. Based mainly on sensors, flow optimization and algorithms, this model has revealed its limits. In smart city endeavors, citizens are seldom included in the planning process, although they hold a central position to produce and share useful knowledge on how they live and use the city. Technology has already been exploited to enhance city management, but it is still widely underused in urban planning even though it holds great promise. It has the potential to create tools that improve interaction between urban planners and city dwellers, which is a key aspect for more sustainable and responsive planning. This study explores how digital technologies can be harnessed to generate new ways of involving citizens in city planning, using the data they produce. Digital tools are changing the whole practice of urban planning by adding a non-expert but practiced knowledge layer in the planning process towards more sustainable cities.

2017

People-centric Data for Urban planning

Stéphanie Aline Hasler

Based mainly on sensors, flow optimization and algorithms, the smart city model has revealed its limits. The city’s smart citizens are scarcely included in the planning process, even though they occupy a key position to produce and share valuable knowledge on how they live and use the city. Technology has the potential to generate tools that improve interaction and information exchange between urban planners and city dwellers, which is a key aspect for more sustainable and responsive planning. This talk will explore how digital tools can be harnessed to create new means of involving citizens in the urban planning process, and how they integrate a non-expert, but practiced, qualitative layer of knowledge. By looking at numerous existing digital tools to collect data from citizen, it will examine how qualitative input can be translated into quantitative data to be easily understandable and usable to inform both research and urban planning practices.

2017

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Rapid urbanization, climate change, resource depletion, the desire for more sustainable development and widespread use of the Internet and mobile phones are major challenges for urban planning. While the smart city model is seen as a means to cope with these challenges, it is often reduced to an amalgam of technologies. Citizens are usually seldom included in the planning process, though the knowledge they produce and can share on how they use and live in the city is extremely valuable. Digital technologies create an opportunity to reshape the planning process by improving interactions and information exchanges among urban planners and citizens, which are central in the move towards more sustainable, responsive planning. This research aims to answer the following two questions: (1) how is digital participation changing the role citizens play in urban planning and decision making processes? and, (2) what are the advantages and limitations of involving citizens in these processes through digital tools? This paper explores how digital tools can be harnessed to enhance citizen involvement in the planning process. We will give an overview of how these tools can inform urban planning by providing citizen-centric data to foster more inclusive and responsive planning. This paper identifies both the opportunities - particularly in terms of data production and exchange – and limitations of digital tools.

2017