CROWDSOURCING IN PARTICIPATORY PLANNING: ONLINE PLATFORMS AS PARTICIPATIVE ECOSYSTEMS.

Insufficient public presence within the traditional participatory activities in urban planning is largely caused by their incompatibility with the communication preferences of the public they are addressing. Accordingly, this research is aimed at identifying alternative approaches which enable the creation of new communication channels and improve the level and quality of participation. Starting from the hypothesis that technological development has changed the way we communicate, the goal of this research is to provide the deeper understanding of the current potentials and problems of internet participation in urban planning and also to point out on the future development strategies, which could address the problems we are facing today. By analyzing case studies in which Internet communication is used for this purpose, as well as publicly available data about user activities within the popular web platforms, we investigate the main advantages and disadvantages of the described practice, as well as the opportunities of the application of new communication approaches and technological trends, such as crowdsourcing activities and blockchain technology