Using crowdsourcing to support civic engagement in strategic urban development planning: A case study of Ostrava, Czech Republic

Abstract

Recently, advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have provided opportunities for governments to deploy e-participation to actively engage citizens in public policy-making processes. As often noted, the development towards e-participation not only transforms the nature of government interactions with citizens but also affects the efficiency and effectiveness of public services and thus fosters competitiveness. Crowdsourcing is one mechanism of undertaking e-participation. It is a method for harnessing the collective intelligence of online communities to solve specific problems or produce goods, which has proved to be a successful supplemental public participation tool for city governance, as a way to engage citizens in the process of urban planning. This paper highlights how crowdsourcing can overcome the limitations in a traditional urban planning process. Using Ostrava, Czech Republic as a case study, this paper explores how city government engages citizens in creating the strategic urban development plan. The results show how crowdsourcing contributes to better civic engagement, improves citizens' perceptions of their city, and thus helps to find ways to encourage the competitiveness of the city of Ostrava, which is facing the problem of depopulation.