Enabling public participation through social media

Abstract

Cities are always planned for fulfilling the needs of people socially, economically and culturally. Urban planners must have adequate and comprehensive knowledge about the current situations for making an effective plan for the city. However, the traditional urban planning process is incompatible to address the emerging requirements of such a technologically advanced era. The technological interventions have totally changed the manner in which individuals interact with their surroundings. Today, social media platforms are allowing people to share their ideas, innovation or problems over the internet. The comprehensive views of people, built over the internet will give planners more insight into the public’s views of their environment. These kinds of dataset have the potential to make the planning process more dynamic in nature. This research focus on enhancing the public participation through technological intervention in direct or indirect way. It seeks to explore how the crowdsourced geo-tagged images with hashtags can be used to classify different activities in different parts of Indore City. These activities are superimposed with the land use to identified changes taken places on the prevailing land use. It also focuses on finding and analyzing different feeling associated with the places which peoples shares with the help of hashtags Subsequently, the qualitative and quantitative manifestation of this perception is spatially done through hotspot analysis. Sentiment Analysis is performed on the text which is associated with the images. This would help to know the common points of interest of people in the locality and how they feel about the places where they reside. Crowdsourced geotagged photographs can be used to know about the public’s points of interest in a neighborhood which may signify some potential or problem that needs to be addressed. Such an approach can thus facilitate urban planning at a micro-level. It being a more people-centric approach also increases the probability of acceptance of subsequent planning interventions by the public. This collection of the crowdsourced database from various social media platforms facilitated periodically can hence provide dynamism to the conventionally static nature of planning.