Crowdsourcing processes for citizen-driven governance

The chapter explores the current evolution of smart city paradigm characterized by worldwide-raising, spontaneous and bottom-up socio-technological networks that produce non-planned forms of citizen empowerment in urban governance, via crowdsourcing processes. It focuses on the role of citizen-centred data-richness for unlocking the full potential of people empowerment, which is currently less explored than top-down governance processes. Building upon the mounting critique toward the technocratic paradigm of smart city and the evidence of progressive diffusion of ICTs in public life, the following pages analyse how crowdsourcing can contribute to the creation of smart cities not as the outcomes of top-down, governmental programs or the business strategy of major technology companies, but rather as the consequence of self-empowering practices performed by social actors with the aim of improving the organisation and functioning of the city. Particularly, the chapter suggests that socio-technological networks can use crowdsourcing to spontaneously generate unpredictable positive effects, i.e. can deploy and operationalize the full potential of community-based initiatives, emerging from the interactions between heterogeneous social actors.