Maplocal

MapLocal

Use of smartphones for

crowdsourced planning

Phil Jones, Antonia Layard, Chris Speed & Colin Lorne

Localism Act, 2011

• Brings forward an agenda of individual responsibility

– the right to buy local assets

– the right to build new developments

– the right to draw up Neighbourhood Plans • Easy critique is ‘retreat of the state’

• Reading via Ostrom (1996) might see this as a productive breaking down of barriers between civil society and public sector

Neighbourhood Planning

• Cf. Painter et al. 2011

• Success of schemes for community involvement driven by

– More than tokenistic in policy priorities – More than rhetoric in devolving power – Complementary legal statutes

– Support community leadership/grassroots movements

MapLocal Team

• Phil Jones (Geography, Birmingham) • Colin Lorne (Geography, Birmingham) • Antonia Layard (Law, Birmingham)

• Chris Speed (Edinburgh College of Art) • Chris Blunt (Plymouth Software)

• With support from

– Balsall Heath Neighbourhood Forum

– Jewellery Quarter Development Trust / Neighbourhood Forum

– Joe Holyoak / Mike Mounfield – Chamberlain Forum

AHRC Connected Communities

Funding

• Localism and connected neighbourhood

planning AH/J006580/1

• Aim: ‘to develop techniques that unlock the creativity of communities gathering materials to inform neighbourhood planning’

• Context

– Localism Act, 2011

– ‘Front Runner’ Neighbourhood Forums

Designing a smartphone app

• What kinds of data would be useful in neighbourhood planning?

• Pilot scheme, testing with community groups • Leftover cash to do post-pilot development • Shortly to be made available via Google Play • Will be used within a service learning module

Pilot study

• Two sites, 25 participants in each • Balsall Heath

– Relatively deprived, mixed community

– Front runner forum, already undertaken Local Plan making exercise

• Jewellery Quarter

– Lots of creative business professionals

– Neighbourhood Forum not yet as active, no plan in place as yet

What we did

• Participants loaned a smartphone/tablet for up to 2 weeks

• Field-based training session with research assistant Colin Lorne, including a walking interview

• Paid £100 for helping us pilot the interface • Feedback to Colin on returning the device • Invited to participate in a focus group

What we got

• Geo-referenced maps of each area

– 626 audio clips

– 181 boundary marks – ~1000 photographs

– Lots of feedback about what we needed to improve

Non-white Female 30 or under 18-20 Balsall Heath

(n = 26) 18 10 11 6

Jewellery Quarter

This is the planned site for the travellers to come and park

here and we have managed to the community living around here. I think the planners need to hurry up and do something because this is affecting the residents of Highgate and of Balsall Heath.

...recently, this

pub has

been closed down

up for sale and most likely I think some restaurant will take over,

they'll turn it

into a restaurant and

they'll include this in

the

Balti Belt

Now, the Chamberlain Building

here, I'd quite happily drop a

nuclear bomb on. What we have in

succession here is a Subway, a

Coral Bookmakers, a Tesco Express,

a Greggs and a Dhillon's Fish Bar.

It's horrendous. It's almost a

parody of a crap high street.

So, just taken a photo of a bin, which is a

weird

thing to take a

picture of

Quarter. But it has a

JQ

little

touches like that

which really personalises

this part of Birmingham that makes it a

special place

There's a weir here which is completely

open. Unfortunately, two years ago a

young lad who had been out on the town,

very drunk, fell into it and lost his life. It's

very exposed and accessible piece of

waterway and it really worries me that it's

not fenced off at all. It's adjacent to some

wooden decking which gets very slippy

And just to show that we're not adverse to

modernity, whatever that is, that is one of our latest additions which is a

massage parlour and sauna, I'm assured. I've never been inside. Lovely little notice on the door which says 'cash machine inside'. I'm sure if I was

short of a few bob to go to Tesco’s just down the road I might not use that one, but each to their own!

So can't be certain what

goes on inside Libre Parlour, but there's rumours it's a massage parlour and I don't like the idea of that sort of thing on the edge of where you live. I'm sure it goes on everywhere but it seems pretty blatant and pretty unnecessary.

[Vyse Street] where it intersects with Great Hampton Street. Dual-way traffic, there's car parking on one side which means that at peak hours it's really hard for vehicles to squeeze

through in the available space and I wonder how many mirrors have been knocked off parked cars in this section? It really does get busy here and there really just isn't enough room for parking.

Ok, this is a picture of Spectacle Works which is an old listed building that was regenerated by Midland Co-Op Housing Association... Been open over a year,

still there's only 5

occupancies ...

lots of

availability

I'm not really sure

I've now definitely

reached the stage when

I'm going to put this piece

of kit on the floor and

Everyday practice

• Pilot scheme

– Now being trialled by Worcestershire County Council for heritage townscape survey

• If well-designed this can be quite intuitive even for the less technically confident

• Crowdsourcing can give policymakers confidence to implement plans

– ‘Representative’ of local expertise

– Can we develop something to allow multiple people to rank their priorities for intervention?

Limitations

• How do you reconcile multiple local expertises? • Doesn’t replace traditional engagement exercises,

but can augment them

– Can engage groups who wouldn’t come to a standard public meeting

• Triangulation with other data sources (‘traditional’ experts)

• Issue of translating and analysing this information still remains (cf. Goodchild 2007, citizens as