Dog fouling and potholes
Understanding the role of coproducing ‘citizen sensors’ in local governance
Alex Parsons, Peter Matthews, Elvis Nyanzu, Alasdair Rae
Local governments around the world are increasingly coproducing services with citizens, commonly as a response to austerity. A common approach is to use ‘citizen sensors’, relying on citizens to report issues digitally through web portals or apps. There is mixed evidence about how different citizens act in different environments with concerns about resulting (in)equity in outcomes. This paper examines citizen-reporting of maintenance of the public realm through a UK digital platform (FixMyStreet.com). We find service requests follow a parabolic relationship between neighbourhood deprivation levels and reporting, but ignoring the contributions of ‘superusers’ there is a more linear relationship, with more reports in less-deprived areas. We find that the presence of significant infrastructure (transport, schools) leads to more reports, suggesting guardianship over journeys as well as residential neighbourhoods. We conclude that local government, when directly coproducing services with citizens, need to be careful to ensure equitable outcomes between neighbourhoods.
Related Items:
-
How men and women use FixMyStreet differently
October 2019
-
Validating gendered reporting behaviour on FixMyStreet.com
June 2019
Research newsletter
Sign up to our mailing list for updates about new publications and events.
Cite this
Parsons, A., Matthews, P., Nyanzu, E. and Rae, A. (2022). Dog fouling and potholes. [online] mySociety Research. Available at: https://research.mysociety.org/publications/dog-fouling-and-potholes [Accessed 6 Sep 2026].