Gao, Z.; Wang, S.; Gu, J. Public Participation in Smart-City Governance: А Qualitative Content Analysis of Public Comments in Urban China. Sustainability2020, 12, 8605.
Gao, Z.; Wang, S.; Gu, J. Public Participation in Smart-City Governance: А Qualitative Content Analysis of Public Comments in Urban China. Sustainability 2020, 12, 8605.
Gao, Z.; Wang, S.; Gu, J. Public Participation in Smart-City Governance: А Qualitative Content Analysis of Public Comments in Urban China. Sustainability2020, 12, 8605.
Gao, Z.; Wang, S.; Gu, J. Public Participation in Smart-City Governance: А Qualitative Content Analysis of Public Comments in Urban China. Sustainability 2020, 12, 8605.
Abstract
Public participation is crucial in the process of urban governance in smart-city initiatives to enable urban planners and policy makers to take account of the real public needs. Our study aims to develop an analytical framework using citizen-centred qualitative data to analyse urban problems and identify the areas most needed for urban governance. Taking a Chinese megacity as the study area, we first utilise a web-crawling tool to retrieve public comments from an online comment board and employ the Baidu Application Programming Interfaces and a qualitative content analysis for data reclassification. We then analyse the urban problems reflected by negative comments in terms of their statistical and spatial distribution, and the associative factors to explain their formation. Our findings show that urban problems are dominantly related to construction and housing, and most frequently appear in industry-oriented areas and newly-developed economic development zones on the urban fringe, where the reconciling of government-centered governance and private governance by real estate developers and property management companies are most needed. Areas with higher land price and a higher proportion of aged population tend to have less urban problems, while various types of civil facilities affect the prevalence of urban problems differently.
Keywords
urban governance; public participation; public comments; web-crawling data; qualitative content analysis; urban China
Subject
Social Sciences, Geography, Planning and Development
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
