Citizen engagement body of knowledge – A fuzzy decision maker for index-term selection in built environment projects

• Published in: Cities 2021-05, Vol.112, p.103137, Article 103137
• Main Authors: Zarei, Farzaneh, Nik-Bakht, Mazdak
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Built environment; Citizen engagement; Citizen participation; Citizens; Development programs; Document modeling; Fuzzy inference mechanism; Fuzzy sets; Inference; Internet; Knowledge management; Smart cities; Urban development
• ISSN: 0264-2751; 1873-6084
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2021.103137

Contribution of citizens is a key factor in the success of urban development projects and the cornerstone of smart cities in general. The domain researchers have attempted to understand the attributes of a meaningful and effective collaboration with citizens and improve the quality of engagement accordingly. With this aim, a rich and extensive literature has been created, covering different aspects of citizen engagement. The subjective-ness and context-sensitivity of involved issues, however, do not allow for a ‘universal’ standard solution to be proposed, even to a similar problem, in different spatiotemporal contexts. In this paper, after an extensive analysis of a broadly inclusive range of existing literature through more than 1092 publications, a conceptual framework is proposed to contextualize citizen engagement in urban projects. Using this framework, a model is trained, with the aid of the fuzzy paradigm to provide fuzzy sets of most relevant keywords for a query regarding citizen engagement in urban projects, and a decision support system is developed to retrieve the most relevant publications, based on the fuzzy inference mechanism. The system provides the most relevant keywords for reviewing the literature, as well as the most related documents, through answering a set of simple questions. The solution is deployed through a user interface, linked to the well-known Elsevier online database Scopus. The developed system can assist researchers and practitioners with retrieving knowledge from the literature, for setting up new projects. •A framework is proposed to contextualize citizen engagement in urban projects via comprehensive analysis of the literature.•The model is deployed as the backbone taxonomy of a document retrieval system for relevant documents from Scopus.•By receiving a project's context fuzzy inference mechanism helps automatically provide recommendations for citizen engagement.•A user friendly interface is developed to deploy the developed system.