Our Walk
A digital participatory tool for mobilizing and engaging citizens.
What does a city look like, when viewed through the eyes of its residents and visitors? Our Walk is an application developed by our Community Lab. The mobile app invites its users to take photos that express how they feel about the places that surround them. Users are encouraged to react to other people’s photos, allowing us to map how people perceive their surroundings differently.
“We long for more diverse and nuanced insights about how the city works as a space of belonging – not seen from the professional eyes of those who plan it, but from those who live in it.”
Using Our Walk.
Our Walk is a user-friendly app that functions similarly to the apps we open on a daily basis. Simply capture, tag, and react. This data allows us to uncover which places are perceived differently by different people, without conducting a meeting at city hall in the hopes that the attendees are representative. Digital participation through methods like ours ensure inclusivity in citizen participation. Here you can read the privacy policy about data protection when using the app.
Looking to collect data for a development project? Wondering how to increase citizen participation through digital methods? Get in touch, and let us help design an engagement process for you.
Legacy.
The original app was used to investigate how a city should be designed as socially sustainable. Minorities and underrepresented groups were asked to take pictures of urban spaces and communicate whether they made them feel safe, unsafe, included or excluded.
The app was redeveloped by our Community Lab in cooperation with DIGIT srl. The original app was developed by Iain Kettles, designed by Marcos Cisneros, and was in turn inspired by the Snappthis app by Marije ten Brink. The original app is open-source at urbanbelonging.com.
