Trends in Citizen-Generated and Collaborative Urban Infrastructure Feedback Data: Toward Citizen-Oriented Infrastructure Management in Japan

Abstract

Infrastructure management has become a serious problem in many cities. However, the monitoring of daily urban infrastructure requires active feedback, not only by municipal government officers, but also by citizens. In this study, we analyzed Chiba City’s ‘Chiba-repo’ platform to measure citizen feedback and collaboration in urban infrastructure maintenance. We compiled data on over 40,000 citizen-generated reports of infrastructure issues during the period from September 2014 to December 2016 through the Chiba-repo platform and analyzed the geographical distribution and text mining by categorizing the reports. The most frequent report was about road issues, representing 93.8% of the total. As a result, many reports were received from citizens from a time-consuming report like light repairs (average 24.4 days); also, road issues were revealed to be a major town problem. On the other hand, the unsolved issue rate is lower (3.7%) compared with telephone correspondence and counter contact, since posting through the web application allows for a detailed report that includes position information and photographs. The research also predicted that many infrastructure problems would occur on narrow roads and in areas with many elderly people, and that road issue reports are regularly needed in areas that cannot be found or patrolled by administrative staff.