Research Project: Smart Cities - Gamification, Prediction Markets, Wikis & Co: New knowledge for cities

Project briefing

• Status Completed
• Project duration November 2015 – May 2018
• Programme ExWoSt

Cities Countries, Data Rivers? Digitalization means: More knowledge than ever is available. Data can be gathered, connected and analyzed in innovative ways. Communication and decision-making processes in cities and urban planning are undergoing rapid changes. This project explores if and how gamification, wikis, prediction markets and other developments can create knowledge for cities.

Project duration: November 2015 – Mai 2018

Digitalization offers innovative ways to gain knowledge with new methods like gamification, wikis, prediction markets and big data analyses. This poses three major challenges:

1. Gathering and categorization: How can new forms of knowledge generation, knowledge organization and decision making be structured? How can scientists, municipal decision makers and planners identify the best methods?
2. Evaluation: Which criteria are suitable to judge applicability and relevance? How can these criteria be identified and operationalized with respect to the needs and challenges at hand?
3. Selection: What will be the results in real world situations? How can these results be generalized from the examples presented in this projects to other situations?

Schematic graphic of the approach in the research project Source: STAT-UP

Knowledge gained through new methods can on the one hand be used by cities and municipalities. They regularly have to make complex decisions based on incomplete knowledge. But what challenges are raised by these methods and do the results justify the possible costs? To answer these questions this project investigates how methods used by companies to organize knowledge and support decision making processes can be applied by the public sector at the municipal level.

On the other hand, empiric urban planning regularly requires data, currently gained from surveys, process data from administrative processes and public registries. But these data sets are often outdated and do not cover relevant areas sufficiently. Due to this, many research questions remain unanswered. This project therefore explores whether new methods of gathering and analyzing knowledge can enable urban planning to reach more precise and well-founded conclusions.

Finally, it is of particular interest whether self-organizing and collective forms of knowledge generation can support communication of and about city development and the dissemination of knowledge in general: How can examples of organizations unrelated to and often far-removed from the public sector and examples from the internet be translated to local governments? Can process-specific and specialized knowledge and best-practices of urban development be disseminated more quickly and more efficiently with the use of new collaborative and/or self-organizing methods?

Contractors of this research study was STAT-UP Statistical Consulting & Data Science GmbH in cooperation with Studio | Stadt | Region (Munich), Urban Progress GmbH (Munich) and the chair of urban development, Technical University of Munich.