Taking different forms and varying in emphasis, civic crowdsourcing platforms centre around the aim to increase citizen’s involvement in giving shape to their neighbourhoods. Under rhetoric such as “putting the community in the driving seat” (Spacehive.com), they claim to offer tools that can be used to unleash and build upon the creative potential of a diverse citizenry, strengthen community ties and enhance ownership over the public sphere. Putting those claims to question, this research uses a participatory governance perspective to investigate how civic crowdsourcing can be understood from an urban governance context, and what they imply for the democratic qualities of citizen participation processes at the local neighbourhood scale. Given the prime importance of context-specificity in this question, the case of Copenhagen’s Integrated Urban Renewal programme (Områdefornyelse) is used to anchor the analysis.
Overviewing international examples of existing platforms allows us to characterize the wide variety of approaches to civic crowdsourcing, and to distil patterns into a threefold typology. Drawing upon desktop study methods and exploratory interviews, their democratic effects and the controversies they give rise to are characterized along the five core democratic notions of access, accountability, public deliberation, adaptiveness and development of political identity. Two workshops, each with a discussion and a prototyping round, are held with a diverse set of Copenhagen’s urban actors, in order to test how these controversial features of civic crowdsourcing are perceived, and to what extent and under what conditions this method can (not) provide value in participatory processes in Copenhagen’s Integrated Urban Renewal programme.
This research finds that while civil society actors and municipal actors include remarkable different emphases in their prototyped platforms, common ground is found in the importance to connect online arrangements to strong offline counterparts, and methods of bridging between municipal actors and citizens. In both ways, the envisaged platforms go beyond the examples that are currently observed internationally. In the hypothetical case of operationalization of a prototype along these lines, this might constitute its greatest risk for failure, or turn out to be a major strength.