Using Bottom‐Up Digital Technologies in Technical Decision‐Making for Designing a Low‐Carbon Built Environment

This chapter discusses bottom-up data gathering and usage in the context of smart cities, sustainability, energy and digital transitions from the perspective of how they inform technical decision-making. It explores how technicians use bottom-up data to reconcile performance demands with citizens’ demands when building and regenerating neighbourhoods and cities. To this end, it focuses on exploring two extreme approaches to bottom-up data collection: when data are collected by digital sensors ‘on behalf’ of people and when data are collected by citizen scientists using digital technologies to feed technical decisions. Through distinct real case studies, two in Germany and one in Italy, it discusses the rationale and post-processing techniques put in place to re-use and transfer good-quality data when it becomes available as well as the difficulties in translating data collected by citizen scientists themselves into useful technical information. The chapter exposes the complexity of problems technicians face while reconciling demands, which vary from data quality and inferred meaning when attempting to extract a ‘sense of place’ to broader technical dilemmas of translating policies related to active citizen participation and energy transitions into reality by pursuing a single holistic view.