How can urban residents reach a shared vision of the future?

Many excellent and potentially transformative ideas fail to be deployed in cities due to a lack of consensus. Complex, nuanced issues are often reduced to binary choices, leaving stakeholders without a structured process to make informed, collective decisions, which often involve compromise. Traditional public open-mic meetings and static presentations typically fail to engage diverse community voices in a nuanced exploration of the future.

Analytical and Experiential Platforms for Community Engagement

The City Science Center has pioneered an evidence-based, data-driven approach to foster consensus through the development of CityScope—an interactive platform designed to enable stakeholders to visualize and assess the impacts of various urban interventions collaboratively.  CityScope allows participants to explore scenarios related to housing types and density, amenities, transportation infrastructure, and public space reconfigurations to facilitate a deeper understanding of potential outcomes.

Our current project to help residents in San Francisco participate in the rezoning process provides two views of each possible future:

• Analytics: a quantification of urban performance metrics and the visualization of simulations to communicate complex information

• Experience: a perceptual view of how each proposal might change the character of their community with high-fidelity visualizations of how the streetscape may evolve over time.

Why It Matters

Deploying tools like CityScope transforms the decision-making process from top-down directives to inclusive, participatory planning.