Civic participation in smart cities: the role of social media

Abstract Nowadays, the perspective of smart cities is addressed in the social media. Big cities are facing problems in which the information lack is an important requirement to find solutions. Thus, social media has become a very prominent data source to obtain data and contextual information. Recently, cities are exposed to a variety of challenges such as health care, environment, energy consumption, traffic congestion, housing, education, public safety, budgets, economic development, demographics, diversity, and inclusiveness. So, technological advances bear the promise of addressing many of these challenges. At this point, the feedback from the citizens and city inhabitants is needed to collaborate voluntarily with observations about their surrounding environment. Thus, the technology plays an important role to offer solutions essentially fostering the civic participation. This chapter is focused on examining this particular issue, taking into consideration data from social media that can assist governments and organizations to better understand various phenomena massively and nearly to real time. A framework for urban analysis based on civic participation is proposed, in which social media posts are used to explicitly describe geographic features and events as well as spatial relationships that include time stamps and geolocation data. On the other hand, to highlight the advantage of the framework, a geographic information system–approach is considered, emphasizing aspects related to the data quality, where the diversity of criteria applied by users in the data acquisition is presented. As a case study, Twitter was chosen as the social media for its common use in scientific and commercial data analysis.