Finding Places: Using Augmented Reality to Find Housing Solutions for Refugees in Hamburg
In response to the housing crisis surrounding the influx of refugees arriving in Hamburg in 2016, MIT Media Labs and the City Science Lab at HafenCity University collaborated with the local government to create the Finding Places project. The project’s mission is to find the most applicable residential accommodations for refugees through group participation. Using MIT’s urban modeling and simulations platform CityScope, the team led by Ariel Noyman and Kent Larson, created a user-friendly simulation for local residents to aid in the search for housing solutions for incoming refugees.
CityScope is comprised of an urban model- a street, neighborhood, etc. set over a table frame, a computational analysis unit, a feedback module, and color-tagged bricks standing in as buildings or masses. The platform allows users to virtually design existing spaces by dragging the color-tagged bricks around to find and create potential accommodations. In 2018, over five million people had participated in the simulation and found one-hundred-sixty viable housing locations.
Noyman expressed that although AR is usually a single user experience, group collaboration is incredibly helpful when utilizing it in city planning. Efforts to incorporate wider civic engagement into city planning and governance can be made possible through group AR workshops such as the ones that Finding Places held. Noyman’s point is rightly made through his teams’ successful impact on residential planning in Hamburg. Their use of urban visualization through AR went beyond the technological augmentation into true reality and by 2018, forty-four locations were authorized by the Hamburg government to be built for housing accommodations, and ten are already underway.
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