CROWD PARTICIPATION IN URBAN DECISION MAKING AND PLANNING: AN EXTENSIVE URBAN CROWDSOURCING LITERATURE REVIEW

Abstract

Urban crowdsourcing has been gaining attention from research communities due to its presumed capability of enabling citizens to be city prosumers of data, opinions, and ideas about their city (Lea & Blackstock, 2014). Recently, several urban crowdsourcing investigations and various experiments have been conducted with a view to engaging citizens in order to produce information about their cities and their communities. This article reports on a research based on a systematic analysis of the literature on “urban crowdsourcing” conducted by the authors. Following the general guidelines of the systematic literature review method (Moher et al., 2009), we analysed the current literature available online, searching for combinations of keywords on ISI listed proceedings as well as on databases of leading world publishers. We also used Google scholar to evaluate the popularity of articles, taking account of their citations. The process of identifying and reviewing the literature was conducted in two phases, from September 2017 to February 2018. From our research emerges the potential benefits of crowdsourcing, especially for urban decision making and planning. However, a few of concerns related to crowdsourcing processes have been raised: difficulties in involving people; risks for privacy; quality and accuracy of information gathered.