In the recent decades cities attracted scholars and practitioners’ interest as the appropriate space for experimenting innovative strategies for urban sustainability governance, which requires a balance between environmental protection measures, social cohesion and the provision of democracy. Special attention is now devoted to the adoption of participatory approaches, and the web 2.0 architecture for data collection &sharing through peer-to-peer and wiki-technologies has been exactly welcomed as a shortcut toward the democratisation of governance processes.

Particularly, crowdsourcing can impact on governance model by fuelling the integration of environmental, social and economic priorities in the urban governance agenda; and by reviewing the mode of interaction between governing bodies, research institutions, business and social actors. This can lead to the attainment of sustainability goals, by generating citywide technological leap-frogging and community-based decentralised knowledge and policy production systems.
Actor-Network Theory framework and Scenario Building analysis are adopted for modelling current material-semiotic fluxes in USG; and for prefiguring future social, political and economic development determined by the introduction of crowdsourcing processes.

CROWD_USG provides:

• A broad exploration of current knowledge on the adoption of crowdsourcing processes for fuelling participatory governance processes and dealing with urban sustainability issues;The analysis of forefront applications in the city of Ghent, Belgium;
  A scientific investigation on how technological agency can transform knowledge production and decision-making processes;
  The design of an urban sustainability model characterised by the implementation of crowdsourcing processes and tools.