Crowdsourcing: A New Tool for Citizen Participation in Urban Development

Abstract

Post-Independence urban development in India was guided by city development plans which were drawn to address the growing needs of the city. Planners and administrators prepared development plans which were usually of 20 year duration guiding and regulating the city growth. Development planning is usually a top-down process where experts use forecasting &land use methods to regulate the growth of the city and the participation of the citizens is limited. There is a gap between the citizen's needs &aspirations and city development plans, clearly demonstrated by the recent scrapping of the Mumbai Development Plan. In Mumbai, the planners and citizens saw each other as antagonists than as partners in the planning process. While theoretically cities are opening up for greater citizen's participation however, in practice lots more need to be achieved. Some recent efforts of citizen's participation with the aid of information and communication technologies like the Smart City Planning for Pune where ideas were generated through crowd sourcing open up new avenues for active citizen's participation. Similarly, Urban Venture Lab a crowd sourcing platform at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore incubates technology based ideas from citizens for solving urban problems. This paper reviews the Smart City Planning Pune and Urban Venture Lab experience and explores whether new technologies can aid active citizen's participation in the city development process. With the new Smart City Initiative being taken up in a big way by the Government of India, the learnings from the cases have a potential for deepening the idea and scaling up.