Crowdsourcing Local Knowledge with PPGIS and Social Media for Urban Planning to Reveal Intangible Cultural Heritage

Abstract

In participatory urban planning, understanding local stakeholders’ viewpoints is central, and, thus, gathering local knowledge has become a frequent task in planning practice. However, the built cultural heritage is usually evaluated by experts neglecting the values and opinions of citizens. In this study, a crowdsourcing model for assessing local residents’ viewpoints and values related to the built cultural heritage of Nikkilä was developed. The aim was to find out if crowdsourcing with public participation GIS and social media is a functional method for revealing local people’s values, place-based memories and experiences. In the case study, non-professional knowledge was compared with expert knowledge and valuable knowledge about the intangible aspects of the built cultural heritage was reached through place-based memories. Apart from that, social media provided visual representations of place-based experiences and a tool for building a collective memory. Based on the results, it is evident that a multi-method crowdsourcing model can be a functional model for crowdsourcing local knowledge. However, there are several challenges in analysing data and using the knowledge in urban planning.

Taking the urban tourist activity pulse through digital footprints

“…This work enriches existing researchhighlighted in the literature review in section 2from a different angle. The study incorporates a broader range of UGC sources, but focused on very specific areas thus reducing the dataset to smaller datasets, and thereby thoroughly addresses the role of different LBSNs in the context of retrieving UGC to identify and analyse tourist city hotspots (Cheng & Edwards, 2015;Hays, Page, & Buhalis, 2013;Nummi, 2018). Therefore, this work addresses the need for a more detailed approach in this context by developing a reference method that embraces the unique benefits of cross-referencing several LBSNs, as will be fully explained in the Section 4 Sources and procedures.…”

Web-based participatory mapping in informal settlements: The slums of Caracas, Venezuela

“…Much literature on VGI and PPGIS underlines its direct participatory potential (e.g. Babelon et al, 2017;Brown & Kyttä, 2014;Nummi, 2018;Sieber, Robinson, Johnson, & Corbett, 2016). However, our article contributes to the wider literature by revealing how the interests of target communities in resource-poor situations can be best served with an indirect, two-tier approach which is sparked off by planning professionals who perform mapping exercises on the basis of crowdsourced data from workshops on-the-ground and other effective offline community-based data collection methods.…”

A methodological framework for analysis of participatory mapping data in research, planning, and management

“…The analysis methods presented here focus on spatial PPGIS data analysis possibilities, but we acknowledge that web-based mapping surveys also yield a rich source of qualitative analysis in terms of the non-spatial PPGIS data. In fact, mixed method approaches are prominently featured in the literature highlighting the advantage of linking participatory mapping, for example, with narrative analysis techniques to elicit landscape values and development preferences (Plieninger et al 2018), social media to share memories of a place (Nummi 2018), or route tracking to monitor mountain bikers (Wolf et al 2018).…”