crowdsourcing

real estate/shutterstock

Over the last 20 years investment companies have come to dominate the real estate investment and development landscape. But this was not always the case. Prior to the mid-1980s, most funding for real estate came from local people.[read more]

crowd-sourced mortgages

The Crowd House Mortgage idea couldn’t be more removed from the model of today. The capital lent is sourced from people who know the borrowers, the lending decision not made by computer but by those lenders.[read more]

The centers of American urban areas contain poverty that is comparable to conditions in the developing world, rather than what one might expect from the largest economy on the planet. The episodic social and economic collapses suffered in the developing world that were created by colonial and post-colonial negligence, disease, and resource exhaustion resemble the poverty, social, and institutional neglect currently seen in American inner cities.[read more]

  So, if the wildly and justly popular internet app Walk Score hooked up with the crowdsourced travel site Trip Advisor and produced offspring, it might turn out something like the new-generation Walk Score launched this week:  location-based walkability ratings calculated from objective data, augmented with user reviews,...[read more]

A Crowd via Shutterstock

What is crowd-invested placemaking and why is it the next step?This site is all about crowdsourced placemaking; sourcing crowds to make extraordinary places, and to see that in action, check out the CSPM Group. The next step is allowing the crowd to contribute financially to see their visions come to life - crowd-invested placemaking....[read more]

San Francisco is famous for its steep hills,but they can also be a real pain to walk up! However, walkability isn’t just about hilliness or proximity to shops, its a combination of many different factors. So how walkable is the city really?[read more]

Tripp/flickr

Solving problems at the local level, the kind encountered by inhabitants of big cities and regional centers, is becoming more and more feasible thanks to projects based on crowdsourcing technology. Crowdsourcing is getting groups of people involved in the discussion and resolution of all sorts of different problems, ranging from...[read more]

The internet has opened up new resources for funding opportunities. Platforms to advertise projects and find sponsors and funders are developing fast. On such platform is Kickstarter, where developers can promote their project and ask for funding to develop prototyps and deliver products. Others are Go4funds, JustGiving or Profunder....[read more]

Can India transform its planning practices to equally represent the voices of the most marginalized groups? Photo by ILRI. The urbanization boom in India is not taking place without heated discussions and an attempt at inclusive planning. If crafted correctly, Indian cities can serve as role models in participatory planning. In fact,...[read more]

Crowdsourced placemaking had been a private sector sponsored success in Bristol, CT, but what about coming from the public sector? To many, public sector sponsored crowdsourced placemaking sounded rather impossible, with such arguments as: - A municipality doesn’t do placemaking, or implementation, the private sector does. It’s the...[read more]

There’s a plethora of books on crowdsourcing out there, but only one documents the crowdsourcing of a city’s entire downtown. In other words, it shows you how far crowdsourcing has come along, from T-shirts to now cities. Here’s the full excerpt from the book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Crowdsourcing by Aliza Sherman, published July...[read more]

A New Face for an Old Broad from Josh Beckemeyer on Vimeo.Inspired by the Better Block Program in Oak Cliff, Dallas, Texas that crowdsourced a weekend demonstration of what a downtown street should be like, Memphis hosted their own last November. Located on Broad Street, the event, “A New Face for Old Broad“, attracting 13,000 attendees...[read more]