FixMyStreet Brussels: Socio-Demographic Inequality in Crowdsourced Civic Participation

ABSTRACT

FixMyStreet (FMS) is a web-based civic participation platform that allows inhabitants to report environmental defects like potholes and damaged pavements to the government. In this paper, we examine the use of FMS in Brussels, the capital city of Belgium. Analyzing a total of 30,041 reports since its inception in 2013, we demonstrate how civic participation on FMS varies between the ethnically diverse districts in Brussels. We compare FMS use to a range of sociodemographic indicators derived from official city statistics as well as geotagged social media data from Twitter. Our statistical analysis revealed several significant differences between the districts that suggested that crowdsourced civic participation platforms tend to marginalize low-income and ethnically diverse communities. In this respect, our findings provide timely evidence to inform the design of more inclusive crowdsourced, civic participation platforms in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Civic participation platforms
• crowdsourced data
• public data
• geotagged social media data
• visual analytics

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Burak Pak is a postdoctoral researcher and design studio teacher in the Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven. His research focuses on alternative uses of digital spatial media for design empowerment which follows two complementary tracks of enabling bottom-up participation (in) and (through) research and design.

Alvin Chua holds a PhD from the Department of Architecture, KU Leuven. He is currently employed at the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore (URA) as a data scientist. His research interests lie in urban planning, urban informatics, geovisualization, data visualization and visual analytics.

Andrew Vande Moere is an associate professor in the Department of Architecture, KU Leuven. He is the vice head of the Research[x]Design (RxD) research group. His research interests include emerging design technologies, human-computer interaction, architectural and urban computing, media architecture, information visualization and data-driven urban design.

ORCID

Burak Pak http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2901-1032

AlvinChua http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0813-3743