To truly grasp the impact of these pressing issues, let's step into the everyday experience of our community members. 

Imagine walking down the main shopping street. The summer heat is more intense than you remember from your childhood, and you notice new faces from diverse backgrounds, all trying to make this place their home. As you pass by a construction site, you overhear a group of longtime residents discussing their fears of being priced out of the neighbourhood. At the bus stop, a young professional checks their watch, frustrated by yet another delay in public transportation.

These scenes aren't just anecdotes – they're the living, breathing challenges your community members, probably you as well, face every day. 

The Eurocities Pulse Mayors Survey shows that these issues top the list of mayoral priorities in 2024. This is encouraging news, indicating a growing recognition of the need for action.

While governments worldwide are eager to improve, it's crucial to realise that solutions won't solely come from within meeting rooms at city hall or the desks of urban planners. They're hidden in the stories, experiences, and ideas of the very people navigating these challenges on a daily basis.

They make your residents experts in their own neighbourhoods. They possess a deep understanding of the local challenges and opportunities that often remain invisible to “outsiders”. Through meaningful community engagement, you can tap into this invaluable knowledge and get the insights to create more livable and sustainable cities.

Engaging communities means simplifying planning

However, engaging community members in complex geospatial planning processes presents its own set of challenges. Traditional methods of public consultation, such as town hall meetings or paper surveys, often fail to capture a diverse range of voices or accurately represent community needs. Furthermore, these methods can struggle to convey complex spatial information in an accessible manner, limiting the public's ability to provide informed input.

To overcome these limitations, you’ll need to turn to tools that allow embedding interactive maps in surveys to enhance meaningful engagement in urban development projects. Enter Go Vocal.

Go Vocal's Mapping possibilities: a powerful toolbox for planners and placemaking professionals

Having worked with planning and placemaking practitioners in 500+ governments and organisations worldwide, we know how important it is to collect quantitative and qualitative data in (urban) planning and placemaking. At the same time, it’s important to give community members the necessary information in an accessible way for informed participation.

That’s why in our latest release of our Mapping suite, we focused on:

• Enabling the embedding of interactive maps in survey questions so that you can provide residents with the necessary geospatial context.
• Diversifying input methods so participants can engage in various ways to provide specific, location-based feedback, which is crucial for different scenarios. some text
  • Dropping pins on a map to indicate specific locations of issues
  • Drawing polygons for more complex feedback, like outlining specific areas 
  • Drawing lines to illustrate their regular paths
• Unifying the data format for all input methods so anyone who needs to run an analysis doesn’t lose weeks of time by first having to digitise hand-drawn map input. Instead, they can just run it through our AI input analysis assistant Sensemaking.
• Ensuring compatibility with Geographic Information System (GIS) so any data collected through our platform can be imported into GIS systems, like ArcGIS, and consistency and accuracy are ensured.
• Enabling the uploading of a Shapefile so that planners and GIS experts can directly upload pre-existing Shapefiles for more precise and efficient input of proposals or plans.

Leveraging these features in your engagement projects

Wondering how you can benefit from these powerful features to address the five key priorities identified in the Eurocities study? Consider using them in projects on:

• Urban planning and infrastructure: Communities can collaborate on designing public spaces or identifying areas needing infrastructure improvements.
• Sustainable mobility: The tool can be used to map desired transportation routes or identify barriers to walkability and cycling, informing the development of sustainable mobility plans.
• Climate action: Community members can use the mapping tool to identify areas prone to flooding or heat islands, helping planners prioritise climate adaptation measures.
• Social inclusion and equity: You can identify underserved areas and target resources, like spaces for neighbours to meet or sports infrastructure, more effectively by overlaying demographic data with community input.
• Affordable housing: Residents can pinpoint potential sites for affordable housing development or highlight areas where housing pressures are most acute.

Learn more about Go Vocal's Mapping suite

Go Vocal's Mapping toolbox is the solution for urban planners, policymakers, and community leaders looking to find ways to guarantee the quality of life in urban areas, help new faces from diverse backgrounds feel at home, reassure longtime residents about their place in the neighbourhood, and ensure young professionals get to work on time.

To learn more about how our platform can enhance your geospatial engagement efforts, visit our Mapping feature page or request a demo today!

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