Crowdsourcing mapping and participatory planning support system: Case study of Brno, Czechia

Abstract

Many cities have started to engage their citizens in collaborative planning and in re-creating the urban spaces where they live. The case study presented in this paper crowdsourced subjective/emotional responses concerning the environment of the city of Brno in the Czech Republic, from 2,087 respondents, who marked 24,065 points on six different topics and added over 3,000 further comments. The paper presents not only the case study, but also the authors’ own web-application called Emotional Maps—built for crowdsourcing spatial data, mainly about city development and subjective perceptions of urban spaces. The collected data showed three main hot-spots in the city, with a significant number of marked points reported by citizens. The paper comments on the reasons these spots are important for the citizens of Brno and their suggestions for future activities there. Furthermore, the authors argue that ad hoc flexible web-mapping platforms such as the one presented in the paper can be an asset to city administrations as well as urban planners.