Introduction

Urban development processes often suffer from mistrust amongst different stakeholder groups. The lack of transparency within complex and long-term planning processes and the limited scope for co-creation and joint decision-making constitute a persistent problem for successful participation in urban planning. Civic technology has the potential to improve this predicament. In this project, we propose a blockchain-based participation platform, which is able to address all layers of participation.

Use cases for urban participation

  1. Timestamping and Document Management- The immutability of the blockchain system combined with the frequent creation of blocks can be used to realize a so-called timestamping service. It addresses the first layer and most fundamental layer of participation to generate transparency, i.e. Inform.
  2. Feedback and Social Networks Integration- It can be used to record citizen feedbacks.
  3. Opinion Polls and Voting- To consult and involve the public, opinion polls and votes can be integrated as a form of co-decisionmaking.
  4. Tokenization- One reason for the current popularity of blockchains is the token system. It can be used to augment all other use cases.
  5. Crowdfunding- The platform can be used to initiate crowdfunded projects.

Smart Contracts

Management: The main smart contract will manage multiple other smart contracts for building projects and handle all permissions. Once deployed it will provide all data for the app and manage multiple building projects and their use cases.

Permissions: Not everybody is allowed to manage the main contract. We can differentiate between read-only calls and writing transactions in the smart contracts. All data are stored openly for read-only access, but managing the smart contract is only allowed for a closed user-group representing the key stakeholders.

Recording: An urban development project can have multiple use cases which are implemented as separate smart contracts. The main smart contract, therefore, maintains a list of all use case contracts.

 

Credits

Blockchain for Urban Planning is a project of IaaC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia
developed at Master in City & Technology in (2019/2020) by:
Students: Jochen Morandell, Jianne Libunao, Akshay Marsute, Kushal Saraiya.
Faculties: Jose Muñoz.