Leveraging Mobile Apps for Citizen-Centric Urban Planning: Insights from Tajawob Implementation: Fid-Bau Portal

Leveraging Mobile Apps for Citizen-Centric Urban Planning: Insights from Tajawob Implementation

Fahsi, Alae / Kettani, Houssain

The emergence of smart cities marks a significant shift where technological advancements and urban planning merge. At the heart of this shift is the role of mobile applications in boosting active involvement of citizens in participative governance, decision-making processes, and fostering a more responsive urban development. Citizen engagement and feedback mobile apps can have an instrumental role in filling the void between the public and public administrations, thus, leading to citizen-centric urban planning. This paper introduces a mobile application (App) as a prototype to introduce citizens and their human eyes as biological sensors to report data to their local government to enhance public service. Thus, the paper explores the citizen-centric development, and potential impact of such mobile applications using a survey-based methodology in fostering citizen participation in urban planning. The paper further highlights various challenges, ranging from digital literacy to infrastructure constraints and privacy issues, among other factors that can constitute a barrier for citizen’s engagement and feedback platforms. The App is named here Tajawob which stands for responsiveness in Arabic and is designed for collecting citizen’s feedback and fostering community involvement, with the hope of coming up with solutions to the urban challenges faced by local cities and citizens.