Abstract
Citizens play a core role in sustainable cities as users of the services delivered by cities and as active participants in initiatives aimed at making cities more sustainable. This paper considers the role of citizens as information providers and discusses the conditions under which citizens can participate in the development of sustainable cities. The objective of this study is to document the sustainability of an urban transit system and evaluate its compliance, with citizen participation as a major contributor. The methodology used is intensive field visits, interviews, and a mixed analysis of Sant Andreu de Palomar District in Barcelona city. The circulating vehicles are quantitatively monitored, qualitative problems are detected, and the typology of vehicles and other aspects identified and detailed in the study are indicated. All this information is contrasted with that of the technological sensors in the sectors. The results indicate that vehicles in the current pattern of urban density planned under incorrect sensor operation influence sustainable behavior through agglomerative clustering. This paper provides recommendations for future urban sustainability assessment research, including the employment of mixed-methods research, among other strategies. This article is intended to assist policymakers and traffic engineers in evaluating the sustainability of urban transportation infrastructure projects considering citizens as sensors.
Highlights
Sustainability in cities is a trend worldwide
If the effort to obtain these data goes from being a simple informative action to a service to support future actions, we find ourselves with the so-called voluntary geographic services (VGS), which use voluntary geographic information to aggregate, correlate and present information in a useful way for specific services [93]
Recent studies have highlighted the importance of context in general, and spatiotemporal context in particular, in studies evaluating new smart city models and their interactions with humans [103]
Summary
Sustainability in cities is a trend worldwide. As the world urbanizes, achieving sustainability in cities is quickly becoming a global concern [1,2]. Citizen participation plays an important role in urbanism and a variety of mobilityrelated activities, including planning, policymaking, program and service design, and evaluation [5]. The involvement and participation of citizens in the sustainable urban mobility planning process is necessary to satisfy the needs of people and considerations that technological sensors do not detect. Citizen participation includes the valuing of non-expert or nonmainstream knowledge brought into the creative problem-solving development of planning [6]
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