Experiments for a Real Time Crowdsourced Urban Design

We present a case study that encompassed an interactive urban design workshop held in Nebrija Architecture University in Madrid, Spain, in March 2013. In this workshop, an urban survey was held and an urban intervention proposal was participatorily developed for an empty plot in a nearby neighborhood. Different online collaborative design tools and data mining were used and monitored over the span of a year, and results were analyzed last March 2014. The findings show that collaborative tools help distribute work and gather knowledge from different sources, but seldom are the span and intensity of these work stages taken into consideration. The timeline and completion of the agenda was a key element during the workshop, determining the success or failure of many of the tools used depending on the time dimension. This temporal dimension still retro-feeds the work process, as some of those tools have become obsolete or redundant in a matter of few months. The lessons learned will lead to future studies on this subject.