A Tool to Design a User-Centred Town Plan

Abstract

The race of rapid urbanization has ended up developing numerous smart cities around the globe. A large amount of funds and resources are exhausted in this sector but the returns are not satisfactory. The infrastructure development is as per the vision and brainstorming of the experts and policymakers of the society. But the same is not accepted by the end user of the recently developed smart cities. So, it is very important to understand the requirement of the end-user, to make these projects successful. The conventional methods of data collection for town planning like questionnaires, personal interviews, group discussions, public hearings, etc. are having their limitations. The major issue with these data collection tools is that they all are very time-consuming and effort-intensive. The end users lose their patience or interest and end up giving biased data which fails the entire purpose of end user data collection. Hence, in this paper, we have designed a tool to collect user-centred data from a large number of people, in a short duration of time. We have used card sorting techniques for making it interesting and easy to understand for the users. The zoning of the city can be easily done, and the same can be used as a framework for detailed planning. So, this paper is on designing a user-centred town planning tool. This tool will ensure that the requirement of majority of the population is taken into consideration. It can be converted into a mobile app-based tool to have the vote of the entire population for designing their own town.