348 / 2018-11-30 03:38:27

Can Social Media Play a Role in Urban Planning? A Literature Review

social media, urban planning, data, urban analysis, participation

全体主题 > Social Media and Planning

In recent years, the widespread use of social media has generated new and big datasets and provided new platforms for urban planning. However, existing studies have often been case-specific or focused on a specific planning domain, leaving the role of social media in urban planning generally questioned. This study conducts a systematic review of to which extent social media can be applied in urban planning. There are two main findings. On the one hand, social media data have been increasingly used for urban analysis and modelling, often combined with conventional and new datasets. The domains of application include individual activity patterns, urban land use, transportation behavior, and landscape. On the other hand, social media have provided a new platform for participation, communication and collaboration. It provides new opportunities for cities to hear the voices of distinctive social groups, even those who do not formally participate in planning processes. In these last-mentioned cases, citizens use social media to initiate and organize themselves for collective actions in planning practice. This raises several issues like population and spatial biases, privacy issues, and difficulties in extracting useful information out of the social media data. It is necessary to pay more attention to the proper dealing with these issues during the collection and methodological handling of social media data.