Evaluating the usefulness of VGI for citizen co-producing city services from citizen perspective: A case study of crowdsourcing pedestrian navigation

With over 50 % of the world's population now living in the cities and the number continuing to grow, cities are increasingly responsible for delivering services to people and businesses. Recent developments in volunteered geographic information (VGI) have provided new opportunities for improving city services by enabling citizens instantly and collectively share and report issues. However, the usefulness of VGI for such use has not been evaluated from a citizen perspective. This paper aims to bridge this research gap through a case study that innovatively uses geosocial media, as an example of VGI, for reporting accessibility issues to local governments and for providing customized navigation services to the general public. Particularly, a study website was developed that allows citizen participants to evaluate the usefulness of geosocial media for issue reporting and for pedestrian navigation. The results suggest that citizens consider geosocial media useful for helping them maneuver dynamic urban environments and for providing a convenient tool for issue reporting. These results suggest that citizens evaluate the usefulness of VGI differently from government officials and that VGI can facilitate government-citizen communication as well as the provision of customized public services, both of which are important to the development of smart cities.