Opening the Gate to Urban Repair: A Tool for Citizen-Led Design

Abstract

City planning in the United States suffers from opaque and unresponsive processes---egalitarian in name but in reality controlled and mediated by city officials and powerful interests, not residents. We explore methods for placing city planning directly in the hands of the people. For inspiration, we look to the democratization of knowledge production through citizen science, and examine how this trend can be paralleled in urban design. To that end, we give ordinary people pattern-based planning tools to help them redesign (and repair) urban areas. We describe a prototype for such a tool that leverages classic patterns to enable city planning by residents, and show through a series of Mechanical Turk experiments that this prototype allows ordinary people to create designs and communicate their intentions without design training or expert intervention.