An Uncontrollable Factor? The Role of Social Media in Urban Planning
Project description
The aim of Pilvi Nummi’s dissertation was to clarify the role of social media and its potential for urban planning, and to promote the development of a well-functioning electronic participation approach.
Based on the results, three different roles were suggested for social media in Extended Urban Planning: an interaction tool for participatory planning, a channel for bottom-up self-organization, and a source of information that reflects everyday practices. Open knowledge building and multidirectional interaction that integrates bottom-up selforganization with administrative top-down participation was proposed as a starting point for smart city planning, in order to adequately benefit from the potentials of the open and participatory citizen society.
One of the three case studies showed that social media and public participation mapping methods (PPGIS) can successfully be combined so that they complement each other in crowdsourcing local information.