Lose the cardboard models

Just like any other municipality, Zaanstad works on renewing and optimizing its urban environment on a day to day basis. Citizens can contribute to this process by taking part in public consultation meetings, involving Powerpoint presentations, fact sheets and flipcharts. That approach, however, doesn’t bring development plans to life and fails to let people experience what policymakers are trying to add to the greater good. Never mind letting them know in what way they could possibly contribute to the process. The unintentional result tends to be a laborious development and planning process in which citizens mainly bring up objections rather than raising new ideas and exploring possibilities. “There’s definitely room for improvement here”, the municipality thought. But how?

In order to show how citizens can be fired up to engage in spatial decision making and urban development, Geodan Go set up a virtual experience point in the city of Zaanstad. It let decision makers and project leaders experience a virtual 3D version of two future traffic scenarios, using Geomagine®; a data driven view and feel technology that enables just about every Dutch local government to create its future environment in 3D Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality. This type of technology addresses issues like residential area development, impact analyses or route optimization. If it turns out that a certain scenario does not meet the necessary requirements, you can conjure up an alternative with the click of a button on your VR controller. This eventually leads to plans that really speak to the people.

Once you start to pre-create urban development scenarios in 3D VR/AR, people will shift from bringing up objections to bringing up ideas for improvement. This generates more involvement and civic consent with urban development, letting both policymakers as well as citizens spend more time on collaboration than on counter-productive debates. Check out the brochure