Role of social media in the devlopmet of land use and building projects

A new social applications era is reforming the way people communicate nowadays. These technologies generate a network effect in turning passive content consumers into active content producers. Land use planning and building projects commonly operate between public and private domains, but the urban data is currently fragmented over multiple industry systems, such as BIM and GIS based technologies. This paper draws from a literature survey and adopts new ways of collaboration into the case study context of “Finnoo-Kaitaa” in Espoo, Finland. The municipality decided to work collaboratively while engaging citizens in developing the city district vision. Through this case study we consider qualitatively social media in enabling increased citizen participation. Conclusively, implications of social relevance in every-day work life are demonstrated through a future knowledge worker scenario. The forthcoming years will reveal whether the industry is ready for a strategic change towards transparent larger audiences with new business communication landscape. for decision-making with the new, integrative ways of working together involving end-users from the early start of the process. Traditional urban planning is too often imposed on a community rather than involving members directly to the process. Communities and citizens are still excluded from the decision-making and design development processes. An argument for an enhanced citizen participation often rests on the merits of process and a belief that an engaged citizenry is better than a passive citizenry (Irvin and Stansbury, 2004). An active community involvement and the end-users in development process are needed, but still there is a huge gap between industry experts and users. Various media and tools can be actively used to overcome problems in the process implementation. As for example, social media may help to bridge the gap between the domains in the traditional development process and particularly activate citizens. This paper addresses the global need to improvise communication gaps within the construction industry by complementing the traditional communication methods with the use of social media in urban area and building development projects in Finland. The research utilises literature survey as a starting point and adopts new ways of collaboration into a case study, as a commonly used research method in the construction industry, to consider qualitative perceptions of social media in combining the building and geographical urban data in the construction project.