Community involvement in urban maintenance prioritization

Prioritization of Operation and Maintenance (O&M) and renewal interventions is a key issue for policy making at the urban level. This paper aims at involving citizens in the urban degradation survey process, in order to support strategic decisions of the public administration, through a streamlined process. This contribution belongs to a wider research, aiming at providing a more inclusive approach also in design and use phase of public spaces and assets. Therefore, it has been developed a web-based decision making platform fostering community participation, conceived as a modular system involving both technical surveys on physical urban degradation and perceived urban degradation assessment provided by citizens. The scope of the research concerns the involvement of citizens in urban O&M and regeneration prioritization, through advanced IT tools. The methodology exploits the functionalities of web-based survey tools feeding a digital district model: a modular information system employed as the participation platform among different stakeholders involved in the prioritization of operations in the urban environment. Data are stored and managed thanks to a Data Base Management Systems (DBMS) jointly with Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Outputs are thematic maps, used by the public administration to make strategic decisions on how to invest for improvement of urban deficiencies. In this paper is presented the possibility to integrate the technical survey module, with the community involvement module. In conclusion can be stated that, the proposed methodology is a useful framework for implementation of strategies for improvement of urban quality, involving citizens’ participation. Moreover, partially automates and fosters the selection of most relevant precincts where to implement interventions.