This Focus, second component of a trilogy dedicated to the innovative ways through which citizens can directly take action to change their cities, will look at crowdsourcing as a powerful tool to empower citizens, enhance mobility and create better public spaces.
Cities aren’t just made of concrete and buildings anymore. Data is becoming key to better understanding cities and to solve the underlying issues facing mobility and urban planning. And smart networks are not the sole collectors and providers of data: citizens can also actively contribute by providing accurate feedback of their city experience.
The following crowdsourcing projects get residents involved in the creation of a more inclusive and safer city, and are part of a larger movement toward more citizen participation in community life.
Citizen crowdsourcing for more inclusive mobility
Projects multiply to create safer streets for everyone through crowdsourcing. In Oslo, Vibeke Rørholt created the Traffic Agent, an app giving kids the power to directly report the things that make them feel less safe while walking in the streets.
In London, a similar initiative was launched by the London Cyclist Campaign to make cycling safer. About 500 cyclists were equipped with a button on their handlebars they could push when they felt unsafe while riding. The button sent the precise location via an app on the cyclist’s smartphone, to a public map. The information was also sent by email to public authorities in order to raise awareness of the danger of riding a bike in London.
In only a week, the participants had already identified more than 1,000 locations they perceived as unsafe on the crowdsourced map. WashingtonPost
Using crowdsourcing as a tool for urban policy
The crowdsourcing of data and ideas is a useful guide to reinvent public spaces according to what residents really need.
Already known for its past crowdsourcing competitions, Boston, Ma did it again to rethink the City Hall Plaza. This large plaza is an idle public space most of the time, and the mayor is determined to turn it into a vibrant location thanks to the ideas of the inhabitants submitted via the hashtag #CityHallPlaza. The wide-ranging communication around the crowdsourcing campaign will surely bring lots of ideas to re-imagine this central place.
This participative approach is frequently used by municipalities seeking to improve public transportation. San Francisco launched the Subway Vision project to plan the future expansion of underground rail transit with its inhabitants. CollectSF invited people to submit their route suggestions for the future lines. The data collected will be used by the local authorities to better match the final underground expansion plan with the residents’ needs. Atelier
Gamifying crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing can be perceived as platforms only experts and highly-educated people can understand. Cities attempt to use increasingly fun and friendly interfaces as an easy way to attract people and encourage them to share their feedback on urban planning and city services.
Mexico’s city bus system is one of the largest in the world – but one of the messiest too, as nobody knows where all the buses go. To solve the problem of this lack of data, a group made up of both members of local government and non-profit organizations created Mapaton CDMX, a citywide participatory game app.
Participants earned points by riding peseros – the Mexican name for buses – while sharing their GPS data with the app. As people play to win prizes and money, they feed the database that gradually creates an accurate map of the bus system. Thanks to this mapathon, about 2,632 rides were mapped across the city. A cost-effective initiative to map the transport routes. NextCity