Abstract
Cities of the future are envisioned to be fully optimised, owing to technological advancements, distributed sensor networks and automation. With the proliferation of new data sources, opportunities also exist for better understanding of how people act and make decisions, as well as discerning the conditions in which they wish to live and what they expect from their surrounding environment. Following the recently proposed normative strand in urban planning, this study uses distributed personal underground development as a case study for extracting the values behind this emerging self-build movement, alongside observers' opinions obtained from associated web-based data.