Open Source Urbanism: Requirements for an Open Design Platform to Support an Emerging Concept

Abstract

Citizens interested in the democratization of urban development processes experiment with the co-creation of public spaces. Some of them collect, improve, and share design blueprints and manuals of their projects on the internet with help of free and open source tools. As a result, they produce open source design manuals that can be used freely, modified, and developed further. However, such attempts at opening urban design are still uncoordinated, atomized, and dispersed, and therefore fail to create the value that a more concerted effort might. We argue that open source urbanism practices would benefit from open design platforms that are purposefully designed for the complex domain of urbanism. As a first step, this paper identifies the requirements that such platform should meet. As there are currently no examples of such a platform, we analyze the platforms that are there and partially satisfy the demand to extract the shared underlying requirements