GUGA: A tool for participatory cities

Participatory cities are those that allow the participation of citizens in the construction and improvement of their common daily life. In this work we present a tool for that participation, allowing the citizens to register the occurrences as well as take knowledge about the global geographic status of their city in on a variety of contexts (security, transit, etc.). However, a tool like that, fed by the people, certainly will deal with a large amount of information, distributed geographically. To accomplish that, a precise criterion for visualizing the resultant density distribution of occurrences must be used. In this paper, we also propose an automatic method for that visualization based on Voronoi Diagrams. The Voronoi polygons divide the region according to the concentration of occurrences. In this scheme, the area of each Voronoi polygon defines the density of the occurrences of the specific categories which are shown in the city map in color and transparency intensities for visualization. This can easily reveal the space distribution of important issues, in a variety of contexts such as criminality, commercial and industrial activities, drugs traffic, illumination concerns, and others.