Crowdsourcing Urbanism

For informations on citizen-financed urbanism, see Crowdfunding Urbanism.

Introduction on Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing urban planning puts the future of cities into the hands of the people in all sorts of unexpected ways, from custom-designing new downtown districts to identifying problem areas for cyclists and pedestrians.

Definitions

• Urban planning
• Urbanism
• Participatory processes
• User generated content
• Outsourcing

Theory

• Process of self-renewal
• importance of the internet in terms of exchanging ideas (social media, globilisation)

Methods

• New strategies for improving cityscapes
• User groups

Examples

Do It Yourself City Manual

The Do It Yourself City Manual is a small booklet that covers a wide range of participatory urban project examples in the city of Vienna. It gives an overview on legal regulations, issues and possibilities concerning interventions and city reprogramming.

Guerrilla Bike Lanes

According to the New York City Department of Transportation, Manhattan's Sixth Avenue is one of the busiest bike streets in the city. But north of 42nd Street, its bike lane comes to an abrupt end. In 2011 the local Community Board's transportation committee considered whether to install a dedicated bike lane up to 59th Street, where the street terminates. After some debate, the committee wound up with a tie vote, an outcome that counts as a no.

Therefore a group of cycling advocates took matters into their own hands, spray-painting white lanes and icons of people on bikes. Some of those got equipped with a pair of wings.

In Seattle a different group of cyclists installed reflective pylons along a painted bike lane on Cherry Street, to demonstrate to the Seattle Department of Transportation "how an incredibly modest investment and a few minutes of SDOT’s time is capable of transforming a marginal, under-utilized and dangerous bike facility into one dramatically safer for cars, pedestrians and bicyclists."

Although the motivation for those interventions seem similar, the outcome for installing illegal bike lanes is very different depending to the city's munincipality. There are possibilities from getting arrested to actually convince the government to pursue the intervention and make it official. Nonetheless it raises awareness on road safety and tries to bring some attention to the issue.

Commuter Buses

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DIY Crosswalks

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MyIdealCity

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Controversies

• Architectural design competitions -> example: Guggenheim Helsinki (estimated almost 60 years of a working life spent in total (1715 projects a 300 hours)

Literature

• Neuhaus, Fabian (Ed.): Studies in Temporal Urbanism. The urbanTick Experiment, 2011, ISBN 978-94-007-0937-9.
• Jeffrey Hou, Benjamin Spencer, Thaisa Way,Ken Yocom (Ed.): Now Urbanism: The Future City is Here, 2014, ISBN: 978-0415717861.