Jihad Farah

Crowdsourced Monitoring, Citizen Empowerment and Data Credibility

Crowdsourcing is today a revolutionary phenomenon changing profoundly our ways of communicating and producing. This article is interested in two issues that are crucial to its development and impacts. On one hand, it investigates the forms and limits of crowdsourcing-related citizen empowerment. It is less concerned by the now recognized fact that crowdsourcing is empowering, but rather focuses on the ways it does so and the architecture of the relations between citizens, scientists and institutions in this new context. On the other, it discusses the question of credibility of data produced through crowdsourcing. This question represents, in fact, the Achilles’ heel that destabilizes the rise of citizen power in the face of experts and institutions. In its discussion of these two issues, the article relies on a particularly interesting case study: the online platform of participatory monitoring of biodiversity in Belgium Observations.be. The creation of databases is an occasion here for reflexivity, learning and mobilisation. It is also an occasion for the liberation of the lay citizen, as an individual, from the straightjackets delimiting the institutional, scientific and associative spaces where he remains a subject, a collaborator or a member – always in a subordinate position. He becomes a peer producer, partner and discussant. More important, learning and action networks that develop in the platform cut transversally through the three spheres. We find unexpected and new cooperations between citizen, scientists and civil servants. Likewise, actions developed through the platform, mainly reporting, counting campaigns and early alert systems attest new modes of action that transgress the functional and ontological division of the three spheres.

Bricolage Planning: Understanding Planning in a Fragmented City

In the last few decades, mainly under the pressure of urban sprawl, economic globalization, increasing social and ethnic differentiation, the city lost some of the most basic elements that defined it since antiquity: density, centrality, demarcation between urban and rural and functional and economic complementarity between its neighbourhoods. As frequently presented in the work of scholars on urban fragmentation, today’s city is a loose agglomerate of quasi-autonomous socio-spatial entities, each evolving “independently” of the others, relying on its own resources and on exchanges within networks involving territories and actors on supra-city levels, like the regional or the global levels1.