UrBis: A Mobile Crowdsourcing Platform for Sustainable Social and Urban Research in México

Recently, the United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-HABITAT) stated that cities in Mexico are steadily expanding, sometimes outstripping the rise in population by two-fold due to urban sprawl, and that 85% of the Mexican population will live in towns and cities by 2050. Mexico also has booming young populations, who are not only the inheritors of significant social and urban problems, but also the most promising source of solutions. UrBis is a technological platform that was developed to help people in Mexico, particularly youth, document, characterize and reflect about the social and urban problems they face. The platform supports an integrative approach that combines mobile crowdsourcing, social technologies and community practices to effectively document, characterize, reflect about socio-urban issues, and to develop possible solutions through the combined effort of citizens. The purpose of this paper is to share our action-research experience with UrBis in engaging youth populations in the field, outlining our findings after analyzing collected data in an effort to determine how our technological-based approach supports the study of urban environments in five cities located across the country.