Urbane: Community Driven Architecture and Planning Through a Mobile Social Platform

Abstract

A community, understands its needs the best; much better than a social scientist, architect or planner, politicians and various institutions such as municipal bodies and all stakeholders need to collaborate with the community to get the best results and fruitful outcome and impact. Most projects for the community are undertaken without input from the community dwellers. There are forums and municipal websites which formulate proposals for comments and but these proposals were not developed out of the community voice, needs and aspirations. With this background, this chapter proposes a mobile online social platform to connect different stakeholders to generate high levels of engagement in decision making, planning, idea generation and lead to resilient, smart and sustainable communities. People act as data donors by leveraging smartphone technology and the platform empowers the users to bring positive change.