Crowdsourcing Urban Narratives for a Post-Pandemic World

Over the past decades, the use of digital technologies to support participatory urban planning and design has been repeatedly described as a crucial instrument and critical building block for tackling historical problems of participation in such processes. Social media, e-participation platforms, and crowdsourcing applications are examples of technologies that can involve citizens in decision-making processes and thus leverage the benefits of collective intelligence. However, despite the extensive use of social media platforms, old problems related to engagement and participation still occur in digital initiatives. Successful collaboration examples between citizens, policymakers, and strategic stakeholders are still scarce based on online social practices. This study aims to introduce a collective intelligence model, which combines crowdsourcing and social storytelling to support participatory urban planning and design from a bottom-up perspective. The paper concludes by discussing a scenario where citizens can engage in mapping, taking photos, sending ideas, or even creating collective stories about their university issues in a post-pandemic future.