How we designed a park totally online.
How to gather residents for the development of the city if we all cannot get together?
As an architect and urbanist, I am used to working with the urban environment together with the residents. After all, we all understand that it is the users of the space who can talk about the problems of the territory, share their ideas for its development, and it is impossible to create a truly comfortable space without asking its users.
Participative urban planning is like UX in IT products — when you create a user-oriented product. The same is in architecture — you need to create your project for the users of the space.
Before the pandemic, it was possible to meet, have a workshop, public hearings. But suddenly we were all locked at home. So my colleagues and I were puzzled — what to do now with the project of the park, which we just had to do in 2020 in the spring. From the options I saw:
🎥discuss everything at a meeting with residents in Zoom, it is possible to do some sketches in Miro
📍collect the ideas of residents on a Google map
✔organize mini-survey in social networks,
📑conduct a survey in Typeform or GoogleForm
Well, afterwords display analytics and arrange it on some website builder.
Hmm … we already had such an experience before the pandemic … and for working with the territory it turned out to be very difficult — you just have a list of ideas that are not tied to a place, you need to analyze and draw up this … and if you managed to collect marks on the map, then the map is too public and not moderated … well … too many BUT …
Are you in the business of urban development and are you familiar with this too? Yes Yes. Our custdev showed it too.
But we were lucky in lockdown — not long before that, after analyzing the results of custdev, my colleagues and I began to develop MVP for a completely new product, in which you can conduct a survey of residents on an interactive map immediately on the finished landing page.
And the main thing is — you get basic analytics of all collected ideas.
At that time, the product was still raw, and we were not sure whether it would be possible to use it now in real design, or if it still could not replace the live presentation of ideas, and then Bingo — life presented us such an amazing opportunity for a pilot project. After all, just imagine — all institutions, everything around quickly closed because of lockdown. We had only 2 days to collect ideas of residents for the development of the park and submit them to the city administration. And we decided to test our product “in a battle”.
As it turned out, everything worked perfectly — in 2 days we collected 100 ideas, on the basis of which the architects created a concept, which was later discussed in Zoom with the most active residents.
Ideas were submitted to the administration and taken for implementation for 2022. The park will soon be completed. We were incredibly pleased with the result, because many are skeptical about working with residents in the online space, but it seems to us that 2020 and 2021 and the pandemic have already shown us all that there is a place for digital tools in urbanism.
Now let’s go back a little — so how did it all begin? How did we get the idea for the service even before the pandemic?
Everything is very simple — in the winter of 2020 we were just processing the results of the surveys for the same residential quarter where the park is, as I said, we just used Google maps, Google Forms, made the site manually — then we got the idea that it would be nice to put it all together, with analytics at the output, of course. And then we saw that architects, developers, management companies and a large number of organizations that are ready to carry out proactive budgeting, participatory design and discuss the most important issues with residents in every possible way, have a need for such a product. We analyzed the market, saw that there are competitors on it, and accordingly, it would be interesting to try our hand at creating a super useful product — after all, we all want to make our world a little better — in our case, to establish a dialogue between citizens, the state and business, to make the voices of residents heard, help create a comfortable urban environment.
So, after the pilot project with the park, we finalized the design of our product, went through a couple of accelerators, which allowed us to refine the product and better understand our target audience.
Our product has been used in 17 cities, and it seems to us that we are ready to embark on a great journey and work not only with developers, architects, but also other companies around the world. We managed to create our product on an enthusiastic basis, being a very small, but incredibly active and talented team.
👀So how does the service work?
An activist or organization working with an urban environment creates a landing page with an interactive map for collecting ideas on our platform and launches a collection of ideas and suggestions from residents. Residents contribute their ideas, vote for the ones they like. Based on the collected data, the analytics is displayed, which is necessary in making decisions on the development of the city.
And all this is by subscription, because with the help of our service, organizations working with residents can
📍discuss on the map the further concept of the development of the territory
👍use the map for meetings and workshops
📑use map for territory field exploration and mental maps
😃conduct an unlimited number of such surveys
And all this on convenient structured landing pages for the entire project or community portal or organization
Additionally, we can help you with the promotion of your survey or portal, and even with the design of materials for this. But let’s reveal a secret, soon it will be built into the service … just shhh …
👵👴OK. The idea of online surveys for territory development is good, but what to do with older people, because not everyone can use the Internet?
Yes, this is true, but digital tools also win here, because the ideas of the elderly can be collected by volunteers, or you can organize the reception of calls or SMS and then add everything to a single database. It is very convenient and you can see all the ideas of residents and detailed analytics.
🤷♀️Okay. Why is it important to ask residents at all?
Oh, here we can tell you a lot — see our detailed article on this topic.
😎Nice. What insights did you receive during the pandemic?
1) residents are really ready to actively work with online tools and can quickly figure out how to use the platform
2) such a tool can work both in big cities and in small
3) the influx of marks depends only on the confidence of citizens in the authorities and the business that conducts this survey. If there is a lot of trust, then you can collect — WoW attention — at least 500 ideas from residents in just 2 days. Where trust was much lower, we still had to use offline methods of working with the population.
But in this we are masters — we have 8 years experience in urbanistics.
🌍OK thanks. What are your plans next?
Well, we have a global idea to make the world a better place and we are for open data, open governments.
And now we are looking for partners for international projects and are ready to launch pilots with different companies.
See below the infographics showing just a part of customers who need our service (apart from architects and real estate developers, who is our basic customer type)
By the way, we are looking for investments to make the world — and our product, even better, to recruit the same inspired strong and talented guys to our team
So that’s it, we talked about our urban creativity during the pandemic. And now let’s go to improve the cities — if you are with us — join!
