Opportunities for Volunteered Geographic Information Use in Spatial Planning

Abstract

This chapter highlights two types of georeferenced User-Generated Content (geo-UGC) that show considerable potential for fruitful usage in spatial planning in practice: Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and Social Media Geographic Information (SMGI). By describing selected case studies, the chapter illustrates how geo-UGC can be used at different stages of spatial planning processes, supporting a more pluralist understanding of places, fostering the collaboration between decision-makers and contributing to a more participatory practice in spatial planning. The Geodesign approach is used as the framework for underpinning the discussion. Selected case studies developed by the authors are presented showing how geo-UGC can be beneficial for building knowledge on current urban and territorial dynamics, for identifying possible alternative futures and for finding agreement on preferable future developments. In all the selected cases, large numbers of users were involved

Territorial Digital Twins: A key for increasing the community resilience of fragile mountain inner territories?

“…This advocates a more holistic and human-centric approach to temporary housing planning, design, and management, which requires consideration of people's needs and Although the workflows and methods adopted to collect and process the data in order to perform a multidimensional (cross-scale and multitemporal) analysis differ in each case (as described in Sections 4.1 and 4.2), another common element in these two studies is the use of open and collaborative data to enrich digital maps and spatial models towards informing more engaging and democratic planning and design processes as part of strategic, resilienceoriented, actions (Fakhruddin et al, 2022). Volunteered, crowdsourced and social media data and geographic information can provide insights about the opinions, needs, perceptions and movement patterns of local communities both in urban and rural environments, useful to define design requirements and strategies (Nikšič et al, 2017;Witanto et al, 2018). Therefore, both studies consider urban design and planning, landscape architecture and civic innovationand hackingas key parts of the larger social and infrastructural webbing of a territory, and raise questions about data and information interoperability in all their multidimensional aspects (Chioni, Barbini, et al, 2021).…”