Citizen participation in urban planning-management processes assessing urban accessibility in smart cities

Abstract

The concept of Smart City, supported by the latest technological advances in the field of Information and Communication Technology, offers great potential to meet the challenges of cities in the economic globalization context. As a consequence, the present work is focused on the deployment of these technologies through public participation activities to generate knowledge for the processes of urban planning, design and management.The methodology proposed in this work allows obtaining information about accessibility problems directly from citizens, based on their own experience. Citizens have a communication channel that allows them to inform, at any time and in any place, about all the accessibility problems they encounter when they move around a city in their daily activity. The work presents a Case Study focused on a experience of citizen participation which has been developed to evaluate the accessibility of urban environments in Benalúa neighbourhood of Alicante in Spain. A diverse group of neighbors of different ages, gender and abilities have participated in the experience. After the experimentation it was concluded that the research offers new forms of communication to facilitate information flows between the Administration and citizens, allowing their integration and feedback