Citizen participation through volunteered geographic information as equipment for a smart city to monitor urban decay

Abstract

One of the issues brought on by rapid urbanization is the loss of livability owing to poor waste management, a lack of resources, air pollution, traffic congestion, and outdated buildings and public infrastructure. The idea of a smart city has arisen as one of the potential solutions to this concern. In this study, we have demonstrated how citizen science helps immensely to the growth of a smart city by crowdsourcing data about urban decay. Tehran, the capital of Iran, which is home to the history of many people's social lives, has begun losing some of its vitality. Municipalities have plans for dealing with urban decline and revival, but we indicate that volunteered geographic information (VGI) would be more effective in turning such ideas into practice. According to our research, there are three different types of organizations active in urban renewal: municipalities, civil and urban planning agencies, and organizations that support tourism and cultural heritage. As a result, we provided a system design that outlines the duties that each institution has in relation to urban renewal. In addition, we suggested a service broker with the capacity to publish VGI in order to offer interoperability related to geographic data and services based on spatial data infrastructure (SDI). Beyond that, various types of urban decay, necessary management procedures, the sequence of information in system components, and the volunteer's behavior confronting the system were all specified in the form of an object-oriented design. A prototype system based on state-of-the-art in open-source technologies was developed to test our hypothesis. The VGI system enabled us to monitor urban decay events in real time using the management dashboard. We have shown that volunteers can distinguish between urban declines and typical instances like a binary classifier in the quality control method proposed in this study. Performance was 90% based on the findings of the quality control. A running VGI system would start beneficence after 3 months and make a profit of 150% after a year, based on our estimates.

Keywords: Citizen science; Crowdsourcing worn-out urban fabric; GIS; SDI; Urban deterioration; VGI.