Community-Centered Urban Sensing: Smart Engaged Planning and Design in a Dysfunctional Urban Context

The authors examine the problem of integrating urban sensing into engaged planning. The authors ask whether enhanced urban data and analysis can enhance resident engagement in planning and design, rather than hinder it, even when current urban planning and design practices are dysfunctional. The authors assess the outcomes of a planning and design effort in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. Community-Centered Urban Sensing is a participatory urban sensing initiative developed by urban planners and designers, architects, landscape architects, and technologists at the University of Virginia to address the need for actionable information on the urban environment through community-engaged urban data collection and analysis. These findings address how technological urbanism moves from data to action, as well as its potential for marginalization. Finally, the authors discuss a conceptualization of smart and engaged planning that accounts for urban dysfunction. The smart cities paradigm should encompass modes and methods that function even when local urban systems are dysfunctional.