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Enabling Smart Participatory Local Government

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Smart and Sustainable Cities and Buildings

Abstract

Social media and online communication have changed the way citizens engage in all aspects of their lives, from shopping and education to how their communities are planned and developed. It is no longer one-way or two- way communication. Instead, via networked all-to-all communication channels, our citizens engage in urban issues in a more complex and connected way than ever before. Therefore, the government needs new ways to listen to its citizens.

This paper comprises three components. Firstly, we will build on the growing discussions in literature focused on smart cities, on one hand, and social media research, on the other hand, in order to capture the diversity of citizen voices and better inform decision-making. Secondly, with the support of the Australian Federal Government and in collaboration with case study local governments, we will collect citizen voices from social media platforms, on selected urban projects. Thirdly, we will present preliminary findings in terms of quantity and quality of publicly available online data representing citizen concerns on urban matters. Analyzing the sentiments of the citizen voices captured online and clustering them into topic areas, we will elaborate the scope and value of technologically-enabled opportunities in terms of enabling participatory local government decision making processes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, Australia

    Tooran Alizadeh, Somwrita Sarkar, Sandy Burgoyne, Alex Elton-Pym & Robyn Dowling

Authors
  1. Tooran Alizadeh
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  2. Somwrita Sarkar
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  3. Sandy Burgoyne
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  4. Alex Elton-Pym
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  5. Robyn Dowling
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tooran Alizadeh .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Research Centre for the Built Environment NoorderRuimte, Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Groningen, The Netherlands and CITTA IDEALE, Office for Adaptive Planning, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Rob Roggema

  2. AF-Wordsmith, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Anouk Roggema

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Alizadeh, T., Sarkar, S., Burgoyne, S., Elton-Pym, A., Dowling, R. (2020). Enabling Smart Participatory Local Government. In: Roggema, R., Roggema, A. (eds) Smart and Sustainable Cities and Buildings. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37635-2_12

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