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

The aim of this paper is to prefigure the future of urban sustainability governance by implementing crowdsourcing-based solutions for governance processes. We explore the convergence between recent research in urban sustainability governance and crowdsourcing. This is done by reviewing the literature in order to acquire important evidence to support the inductive process of theory building, and to highlight the upcoming trends in participatory research and policy-making that exploit ICT and Web 2.0 social software. Our analysis indicates that a transformative relationship between data and people creates new forms of distant search for solutions and decision making. We argue that interest in crowdsourcing has expanded from computing researches to social and environmental applications. This new practical dimension unlocks the futures of integration of crowdsourcing into best practices in the governance of sustainability in an urban context. Building on evidence that implementing crowdsourcing into the forthcoming governance of urban sustainability is increasingly recognised as a common priority, the paper suggests policy makers to devote more resources to ensure openness, transparency, interoperability and adaptability of crowdsourcing platforms.