Crowdsourcing for Sustainable Mobility: State of Art and Future Opportunities to Support Smart Cities Co-Creation

In a world where the Web5 is becoming widespread and ICTs are constantly evolving towards the newest types of devices, the necessity to convert cities into smart urban spaces through open data is increasingly gaining ground between local governments. One of the most hopeful options in this regard is given by the adoption of crowdsourcing, a relevant civic participation activity that involves users in the design and improvement of sustainable mobility policies. Nevertheless, public administrations may encounter a great problem, due to the hard coexistence between objective data detected by using various technologies (e.g. GIS, sensors, etc.) and subjective data collected through crowdsourcing tasks. This work will focus on consolidated knowledge about crowdsourcing through the analysis of three macro areas (literature, technology, and legislation) and further exploration to improve the adoption of this activity for sustainable mobility sector. Starting from a general overview about the definition of crowdsourcing and its application to sustainable mobility concepts, a comparison between the main crowdsourcing platforms available on the market will be illustrated on the basis of some important key features, in order to highlight common strengthens and weaknesses from the technological point of view and propose possible solutions to the identified gaps. Furthermore, a recognition of crowdsourcing and civic participation laws will be reported to understand how public administrations can exploit these activities to involve citizens in the sustainable mobility development process as crucial step of smart cities co-creation process. Future opportunities to support civic participation will be discussed by conceptualizing a new crowdsourcing model based on the integration between subjective and objective data, as well as the implementation of artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to meet specific needs of citizens for the improvement of sustainable mobility services in a more efficient way.