A mixed-source approach to public participation for assessing urban accessibility of neighbourhood public spaces.

Abstract

An accessible city is one that provides high-quality public spaces to facilitate gatherings, access to services, and comfortable journeys for people of all ages and abilities. In order to achieve such spaces, public participation is crucial for planning, urban policy formulation and decision making that ultimately have a direct impact on the city. This research aims to build on the understanding of individual and collective needs in terms of the perception of accessibility to urban public spaces. A mixed-source approach to public participation is proposed that combines data gathered from direct citizen participation and passively crowdsourced geolocated data. Two neighbourhoods in Ali-cante (Spain) are adopted as a case study. Findings demonstrate the potential of a mixed-source public participation approach to delve deeper into the public spaces’ current status by identifying environmental, physical and perceptual issues that impact on the quality of the cities’ everyday experience.