Crowdsourcing urban sustainability. Data, people and technologies in participatory governance.

The paper is intended to outline the possibility for integrating crowdsourcing processes and technologies into the urban sustainability governance. It explores the convergences between the two areas and the future trends of participatory research for policy-making via the diffusion of personal technological devices, ICTs and social software of the web 2.0. The paper builds upon a literature review aimed at acquiring relevant evidences that are useful to support an inductive process of theory building. The findings are validated through experts’ discussion on potential contradictions with current practices investigated by dedicated empirical researches. As a first result, we provide an extensive theoretical exploration of the current transformation of data production/collection, management/elaboration and sharing processes in the crowdsourcing age, with particular regard to those related with urban sustainability issue. Second, we propose some directions for integrating crowdsourcing into those participatory practices that are currently referred as best practices in supporting the governance of sustainability in urban environment. Managerial and policy implications are proposed together with directions for further research, by supporting the thesis that crowdsourcing processes and tool in the broader context of participatory practices can improve the governance of urban sustainability.