The Role of Social Media in Public Involvement

This chapter explores social media's potential to enhance public involvement to pursue sustainable practices on an international scale across planning and development projects. Using a case-study approach, the international institutions of the World Bank, UN-Habitat, Unilever, and World Business Council for Sustainable Development are investigated. The relationship between public versus the institutions' intake on sustainability is examined. Findings identify strong public push for increased sustainability in international development and show evidence of the ways in which international institutions respond to the public. Contributing to the social media research field, it offers an alternative application to the planning profession via e-planning. This could contribute to an extended form of public engagement through social media that goes beyond the limiting geographical borders of each local community, and assesses planning and development projects for their broader sustainability implications on an international platform.

Citizen-to-Citizen Resource Sharing in Emergency Response

During large-scale manmade or natural disasters, such as Superstorm Sandy and Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, collaborations among government agencies, NGOs, and businesses need to be coordinated to provide necessary resources to respond to emergency events. However, resources from citizens themselves are underutilized, such as their equipment or expertise. The citizen participation via social media enhanced the situational awareness, but the response management is still mainly handled by the government or government-sanctioned partners. By harnessing the power of citizen crowdsourcing, government agencies can create enhanced disaster situation awareness and facilitate effective utilization of resources provided by citizen volunteers, resulting in more effective disaster responses. This chapter presents a public engagement in emergency response (PEER) framework that provides an online and mobile crowdsourcing platform for incident reporting and citizens' resource volunteering as well as an intelligent recommender system to match-make citizen resources with emergency tasks.

Writings on the City Wall

Municipality Facebook pages are significant social media arenas for maintaining contact between representatives and their constituencies. The authors use digital tools to collect and analyze some 24,000 posts from the Facebook pages of all Israeli municipalities in a six-month period. Following a purely automatic linguistic analysis of the texts of all posts published on the pages, this study moved to a manual coding of a sample of the most popular posts in the data in order to gain insight into the character of the discourse in these arenas; the actors; the format, type, and emotionality of the contents that attract the highest levels of engagement.

Enhancing E-Participation in Urban Planning Competitions

Planning competitions are used as a way to determine alternatives and promote innovative solutions in the early phase of urban planning. However, the traditional jury-based evaluation process is encountering significant opposition, as it does not consider the views of local residents. This chapter describes how web-based public participation tools are utilized in urban planning competitions to register public opinion alongside the expert view given by the jury. The research focus of this chapter is on studying how public participation can be arranged in competition processes, how the contestants use the information produced, and how it has been utilized in further planning of the area. Based on two Finnish case studies, this study indicates that web-based tools can augment public participation in the competition process. However, the results indicate that the impact of participation on selecting the winner is weak. Instead, in further planning of the area, the public opinions are valuable.

Residential Resource Consumption

Residential energy and water consumption depend on dwelling structure and the behaviour of residents. Aspects of residential behaviour can be derived from census data. Dwelling information is harder to obtain. Using both aerial and street-level views from Google mapping products, exterior dwelling characteristics were captured in each of 40 postal areas in and around Melbourne, Australia. This approach saved the time and cost of travelling to the widely spread suburbs and provided data not otherwise available. The census and dwelling data were compared with resource usage statistics in linear regression models. It was found that energy and water use are highly correlated, with socio-economic variables better explaining water consumption and dwelling structure factors better explaining energy consumption. Nevertheless, the proportions of households that include a couple with children and have a swimming pool provided useful models of variations in both energy and water use. Applications to planning through spatially explicit scenario testing were developed in ArcGIS ModelBuilder.

Enhancing Creativity in E-Planning

Sharing ideas efficiently and effectively in groups is a challenge groups and teams face on a daily basis. In typical face-to-face meetings, many factors can serve to inhibit a full sharing of ideas and thus the development of effective decisions and plans. To overcome the limitations of face-to-face meetings, computer-based group decision support systems have been developed to facilitate both idea exchange and evaluation. Evidence suggests that such systems can lead to beneficial outcomes. However, unless they are utilized effectively, even electronic meetings may not effectively tap the intellectual and creative potential of groups. The authors summarize some of the major findings of collaborative creativity and their implications for effective e-planning.

Public Space and the Development of Wireless Media

This chapter builds on research into Australian free Wi-Fi initiatives conducted in late 2012 and early 2013. It tours through a range of global developments in wireless internet delivery, focusing on how these influence the character of public spatiality, participation, and social inclusion. While there have been numerous technical and commercial advances, the authors argue that free public services narrowly focus on constructing public spaces of consumption and spectacle, and valorising public activities through increasingly granular sensor surveillance. The authors offer an expanded conception of what it means to value public space and to participate socially, culturally, and politically in public. The chapter concludes with the concerning gap between small scale projects that experiment with these concepts and the large-scale institutions that ignore them.

SketchBoard

This chapter seeks to investigate the subject of the design review process and its embedment in digital media, with a primary focus on mobile interactive surfaces. Despite the growing body of academic research on the topic, there is a gap in evaluating how aspects of the design review process can be performed with digital media. The main point of this study is to combine empirical and conceptual design components to evaluate a new communication medium called SketchBoard that uses interactive surfaces to perform selected tasks of the design review process. This study specifically contributes to the state-of-the-art of visualization, communication, and participation aspects of the design review process and mobile interactive surfaces.

Sharing Semantic Territorial Interpretation

This chapter explores the theme of collaborative construction of territorial knowledge through the use of ICTs, proposing a new approach to spatial representation based on semantic ontologies. The theoretical perspective is applied in a recent experimentation conducted in collaboration between the Politecnico di Torino and the Università degli Studi di Torino, called OnToMap – Community Maps 3.0. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part aims to define the theoretical framework of collaborative mapping practices and VGI, social semantic mapping, GIScience, and Web 3.0 applications, specifying which approach to participation is assumed as conceptual background. The second part focuses on the web-based application OnToMap, which relies on a territorial ontology for encourage construction of collective and shared knowledge of places. The chapter ends with a reflection on semantic and cartographic representation of urban space and its potential in terms of citizen empowerment.

A Smart City Remembers Its Past

Integral to some conceptualizations of the “smart city” is the adoption of web-based technology to support civic engagement and improve information systems for local government decision support. Yet there is little to no literature on the “smartness” of gathering information about historic places within municipal information systems. This chapter provides three case studies of technologically augmented planning processes that incorporated citizens as sensors of data about historic places. The first case study is of SurveyLA, a massive effort of the city of Los Angeles to comprehensively survey over 880,000 parcels for historic resources. A second case study involves Motor City Mapping, an effort to identify the condition of buildings in Detroit, Michigan and a parallel historical survey conducted by volunteers. In Austin, Texas, a university-based research team designed a municipal web tool called the Austin Historical Survey Wiki. This chapter offers insights into these prior efforts to augment planning processes with “digitized memory,” web-based technology, and public engagement.