Planning with Crowdsourced Data: Rhetoric and Representation in Transportation Planning

We are in the midst of a new era of experimentation that blends social and mobile computing in support of digital democracy. These experiments will have potentially long lasting consequences on how the public is invited to partic-ipate in governance by elected as well as professional offi-cials. In this paper, we look at how data from a purpose-built smartphone app we deployed were incorporated into a three-day urban planning event. The data collected were meant to help inform design decisions for new cycling in-frastructure and to provide an alternate means for partici-pating in the planning process. Through our analysis, we point to three distinct roles the data played at the event-as authority, as evidence, and as ambivalent. Each role demonstrates the challenge and potential for turning to crowdsourced data as a form of participation and as a re-source for urban planning.

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