counts infinitely

thisbigcity:

With social media services allowing people to tag the locations of the photos they’ve uploaded, check-in to shops, bars and parks online, and have geolocation attached to their tweets, it’s clear that online technologies and the city are becoming increasingly integrated, with no signs of this stopping. This data is accessible and is already being utilised by a variety of innovative applications, further suggesting that data, technology and the built environment will soon be fully intertwined.

We already have maps that show user generated photographs from the area, mobile applications showing local social media activity, and websites like fixmystreet.com that allow you to report issues with your city and monitor their progress as they are resolved. Technological progress is already changing the way we interact with the built environment.

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This post by This Big City highlights the huge amount of potential in leveraging social media for city planning. On the whole, I agree with it — that’s the very reason I have embarked on a career in urban planning looking at social media in public engagement.

That said, I think there’s a lot of work going on right now to sketch out what people in city planning and related fields know and do, and why we do the things we currently do, in order to mindfully integrate the strengths of social media into a planning process. It’s very tempting to say that social media changes everything — and indeed, it can if we let ourselves get carried away — but should it? With the challenge of sustainability bearing down on us with every passing day, it’s already an exciting time; the broad interest in open civic data and mobile applications is also picking up steam (as this post itself illustrates). Are we being attentive in order to avoid throwing any babies out with the bathwater?

I’m personally more interested in seeing subsets of planning already interested in participatory design methods and the use of techniques like storytelling to make planning more broadly inclusive, incorporated into work on social media. So the answer to the question, “Could Social Media revolutionise the planning system?” is Yes — so long as we revolutionise the right parts of it, and can tell which parts of it are worth keeping.

What I’m personally most interested in is social media as a tool for nurturing community-oriented, open groups made up of both “professionals/experts” and everday citizens/city-users focusing on aspects of the city that are most exciting or pressing to us for whatever reason. For some of us that’s transit, for others that’s farmland and others still that’s water. How can we develop tools or methods that have a lightweight “participation footprint” but are still meaningful and impactful for the people who do work in urban planning? You know, those who spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week working on something and who — like it or not — deal with all the unsexy parts of planning too, like zoning or pro-formas; as well as inclusive of those of us who live with the consequences?

Having seen social media work its magic in the enterprise, I feel a lot of time that there’s an expectation that this should already be happening, and that it should be happening faster. I’ve previously participated in this, and the more I learn the more I’ve reeled back on this a bit, because the legal framework, the considerations around customers vs. citizens, the issues of governance, and the people in each kind of organization are so different. Which isn’t to say social media won’t get into planning — eventually. It’ll just take a bit longer and quite a bit harder than just saying, “Why isn’t anyone thinking of this?”

I’d also encourage anyone interested in this topic read up on the work of Stamen Design, who IMO are doing some of the best and most interesting work on apps that are both pretty and useful.