Bikebump : collective urban design

Abstract

Present urban planning issues require to involve the public in the urban design process, and this slow and complicated process remains the primary domain of expert planners and consultants. Although there have been many attempts to leverage new mobile tools to engage the community. These tools support the three stages of planning 1. data collection 2. analysis and visualization three solutions. Within these tools, some gather unstructured data that is hard to convert into physical interventions. Also, some applications are not designed to encourage debate and consensus building. This study will consider how a structured integrated tool will help the process of grassroots urban design. This thesis will focus on the development of a bottom-up, crowd-sourced, urban planning tool to improve the quality and safety of urban bike lanes. A mobile application will be developed to enable non-experts to actively participate in the process of real time data collection and feedback, mapping, selection of solutions, and the establishment of priorities. The system will be evaluated using both quantitative and qualitative methods, compared to present methods on bottom up interventions.