Citizens invited to develop Tallinn’s Urban Planning Application

As part of the Baltic Urban Lab activities, the city of Tallinn is developing an Urban Planning Mobile Application, which complements the existing Planning Register, where citizens can comment city’s development plans. With the App, the users would have fast and easy access to information about the on-going planning processes and the possibility to comment and leave their own proposals. The App would allow users to receive information on the spot of the future plans for places they are visiting. 

For developing the App to respond the user necessities and to improve the usability, the city invited stakeholders to a brainstorming workshop to better understand the needs and to hear the ideas and expectations towards the urban planning App.

Tallinn’s chief architect Mr Endrik Mänd emphasised that the new App would facilitate the involvement of diffeent groups to the planning process and the city should take advantage of the possibilities digital participation can bring to make the city planning process more transparent.

After visiting Tallinn’s Pilot Site the participants with different backgrounds were divided into smaller groups to brainstorm on:

  1. IT solutions that use location-based information for sharing data and ideas;
  2. Possible physical solutions/landmarks in urban space to inform citizens about the redeveloped environment and to invite people to provide ideas/feedback on the spot about the plans;
  3. 3 best solutions from those ideas, developed in the first two tasks, for a given user profile  (owner/ city official/ NGO activist / entrepreneur)
  4. Creating a comprehensive solution for a real life case – the Tallinn Pilot Site Skoone Bastion area

Each group found unique ideas how the App could be used for the planning process of the Pilot site and gave valuable input for the development of the application. Participants identified crucial points for the success of the App - critical mass of users, user-friendliness and possibility to receive location and user profile based notifications.

Generally, the App was seen as a great platform for supporting the design process of human scale environment and making urban development more transparent.

The development of the App continues and it will be tested practically in the Tallinn City pilot site.

Photo: Ramon Reimets