Project Neighbourhood dashboards

Collectively defining what urban progress means

participation process | urban dashboards | exhibition

Clients
Gemeente Rotterdam
AMS Institute

In collaboration with
TU Delft
V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media

Team
Tessa Steenkamp
Roy Bendor
Bob Pannebakker

Special thanks to
Bibliotheek Rotterdam
OBA Waterlandplein
Civic Amsterdam

Local governments and organisations increasingly work with data and dashboards to measure pro­gress in neighbourhoods. What is being measured is often defined by what is tech­nically possible, or by what commercial companies have on offer, but rarely by what residents themselves would like to know.

What would urban dashboards look like if the residents design them? In this project, we collaborated with residents as ‘Neighbourhood Experts’ to find out what kind of local progress they like to see.

Residents as neighbourhood experts

In Amsterdam (the Waterlandplein-neighbourhood) and Rotterdam (Bospolder-Tussendijken), twenty residents subscribed as a ‘Neighbourhood Expert’. They then received a package with research tools and seven small assignments: one for each day of the week. Step by step, they were guided towards drawing their own urban data dashboard.

Ready to reinvent your participation processes?

Rather than inviting people to come chat, let’s get drawing together. By starting with an open-ended question, you might learn more about what is important to the residents of a neighbourhood.

Let’s talk about it

What tells you the neighbourhood is doing well?

The research tools encourage residents to map local places that are important to the community. They take pictures of progress in their own streets, and describe interactions between neighbours they would like to see more often. After envisioning the perfect future for the neighbourhood, they map out how to get there and how to track the steps towards it.

The process ends with a public exhibition. An interactive expo invites visitors to reflect on their neighbours input, and add their own experiences and dashboards.

Further reading