Crowdsourcing Local Knowledge with PPGIS and Social Media for Urban Planning to Reveal Intangible Cultural Heritage

Pilvi Nummi

doi:10.17645/up.v3i1.1266

Abstract

In participatory urban planning, understanding local stakeholders’ viewpoints is central, and, thus, gathering local knowledge has become a frequent task in planning practice. However, the built cultural heritage is usually evaluated by experts neglecting the values and opinions of citizens. In this study, a crowdsourcing model for assessing local residents’ viewpoints and values related to the built cultural heritage of Nikkilä was developed. The aim was to find out if crowdsourcing with public participation GIS and social media is a functional method for revealing local people’s values, place-based memories and experiences. In the case study, non-professional knowledge was compared with expert knowledge and valuable knowledge about the intangible aspects of the built cultural heritage was reached through place-based memories. Apart from that, social media provided visual representations of place-based experiences and a tool for building a collective memory. Based on the results, it is evident that a multi-method crowdsourcing model can be a functional model for crowdsourcing local knowledge. However, there are several challenges in analysing data and using the knowledge in urban planning.

Highlights

Crowdsourcing can be a powerful tool for enhancing public participation in urban planning processes (Brabham, 2009)
The data sources appeared to be powerful sources of three different types of local knowledge: participation GIS (PPGIS) provided knowledge for comparison of expert and non-expert values and place-based memories; social media provided a tool for gathering and sharing visual representations of placebased experiences; the self-organized Facebook group appeared to be a tool for collective memory and knowledge building
The main research focus is on the crowdsourcing model and how functional the combination of PPGIS and social media crowdsourcing was in this case

Summary

Introduction

Crowdsourcing can be a powerful tool for enhancing public participation in urban planning processes (Brabham, 2009). Contrary to this, Brabham (2009) and Seltzer and Mahmoudi (2012) argue that collecting data for planning with web-based surveys or using user-generated social media data should not be considered as crowdsourcing. They emphasise that crowdsourcing is about problem-solving and, in urban planning, crowdsourcing should include planning solutions to answer planning problems. In the urban planning context, crowdsourcing can be seen as a model for enhancing public participation (Brabham, 2009). Local place-based memories and experiences produced in the case study Nikkilä Memories can be seen as local knowledge

Results

Discussion

Conclusion