People-centric Data for Urban planning

Based mainly on sensors, flow optimization and algorithms, the smart city model has revealed its limits. The city’s smart citizens are scarcely included in the planning process, even though they occupy a key position to produce and share valuable knowledge on how they live and use the city. Technology has the potential to generate tools that improve interaction and information exchange between urban planners and city dwellers, which is a key aspect for more sustainable and responsive planning. This talk will explore how digital tools can be harnessed to create new means of involving citizens in the urban planning process, and how they integrate a non-expert, but practiced, qualitative layer of knowledge. By looking at numerous existing digital tools to collect data from citizen, it will examine how qualitative input can be translated into quantitative data to be easily understandable and usable to inform both research and urban planning practices.