Citizen-Centric Urban Planning Through Participatory Sensing Data and Digital Tools

As urbanization accelerates, traditional planning approaches often fall short in addressing diverse citizen needs, particularly regarding inclusivity and well-being (Resch et al., 2016). To create healthier and more inclusive urban spaces, integrating digital technologies, enhanced by artificial intelligence and machine learning, into urban planning is increasingly essential (Batty & Yang, 2022). Such digital technologies, when implemented with mixed methods in urban practice, offer opportunities for data-informed and participatory design and planning by facilitating (i) participatory digital tools and (ii) participatory sensing data that adopt the humans-as-sensors concept (Wilson & Tewdwr-Jones, 2021). For instance, digital tools such as city digital twins and eXtended Realities (XR) encompassing Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality enable interactive simulations that enhance citizen engagement and collaboration, empowering citizens to contribute their perspectives for decisions on urban interventions (Dane et al., 2024). Moreover, analysis of participatory sensing data collected through mobile devices, experience sampling apps, and wearable technology enables real-time insights into citizens’ behavior, opinions, and experiences (Resch & Szell, 2019), allowing understanding of citizens’ interactions with urban interventions and environments. Overall, these approaches provide a deeper understanding of human-environment interactions, democratizing urban planning processes through the empowerment of citizens for shaping spaces that better reflect citizens’ needs and enhance their well-being (Weijs-Perrée et al., 2021).

This thematic issue aims to inspire new strategies that integrate citizen experiences and active citizen participation into the core of urban design and planning, ensuring that future cities are inclusive and healthy. We invite original contributions such as:

-         Theoretical frameworks, empirical studies, and case study analyses on the design, development, and implementation of digital tools for citizen engagement and empowerment;

-         Empirical findings highlighting novel human-as-sensors methods to measure and analyze citizens’ experiences in the city and integrate these insights into decision-making processes.

References:

Batty, M., & Yang, W. (2022). A digital future for planning: Spatial planning reimagined. Digital Task Force for Planning.

Dane, G., Evers, S., van den Berg, P., Klippel, A., Verduijn, T., Wallgrün, J. O., & Arentze, T. (2024). Experiencing the future: Evaluating a new framework for the participatory co-design of healthy public spaces using immersive virtual reality. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 114, Article 102194.

Resch, B., Summa, A., Zeile, P., & Strube, M. (2016). Citizen-centric urban planning through extracting emotion information from Twitter in an interdisciplinary space-time-linguistics algorithm. Urban Planning, 1(2), 114–127.

Resch, B., & Szell, M. (2019). Human-centric data science for urban studies. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 8(12), Article 584.

Weijs-Perrée, M., Dane, G., & van den Berg, P. (2021). Editorial for the special issue on “Experiencing the City: The Relation between Urban Design and People’s Well-Being.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(5), Article 2485.

Wilson, A., & Tewdwr-Jones, M. (2021). Digital participatory planning: Citizen engagement, democracy, and design (1st ed.). Routledge.