Crowd sourced monitoring in smart cities in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Smart cities can be regarded as the latest administrative reform and digital innovation in most metropolitan cities globally. In smart cities as well as in former urban New Public Management modernization and Post Weberian reforms, the important role of the citizens in planning as well as monitoring has been highlighted. Online and offline participation along with feedback can reinvigorate town planning and policymaking as well as policy monitoring processes at the local level. The UK as many other countries reacted to this trend by offering new channels for online participation. The new participative innovations allowed for more participation and more influence by citizen. FixMyStreet is a crowdsourced monitoring instrument implemented in the UK. How it works, what the role of the state and civil society represent, and is crowd monitoring vote-centric or talk-centric will be discussed in the paper. It represents a successful bottom-up innovation approach that was used by numerous municipalities. It is a successful public private partnership and a mix between ‘invented’ and ‘invited’ space, where the role of the state is redefined.