Summary
Social Sustainability in Urban Development was a pilot project within the Vinnova-funded Virtual Gothenburg Lab (VGL), led by RISE and the City of Gothenburg’s Social Resource Management. The project explored how Urban Digital Twins and Augmented Reality (AR) could support dialogue between citizens and city officials around values and feelings tied to urban development. I led interaction design and UX research, focusing on user insights, design exploration, and concept development. The outcome was a prototype AR app that connected residents and city officials to Gothenburg’s digital twin, enabling place-based storytelling and citizen dialogue. The project is featured in the book Geodesign, Urban Digital Twins and Futures as an example of how citizen input and local knowledge can inform more inclusive urban planning.
Augmented Urban Values:
Using AR to build trust in citizen dialogues.
Design challenge
Cities are changing fast, and decisions about what gets built or removed are often made based on data, economic goals, or political strategies. But these decisions don’t always take into account what matters most to the people affected, things like community, safety, history, or belonging. These values can be hard to measure, but they’re just as important in city development. This project explored if urban digital twins (UDT's) could help make those invisible values visible and more tangible in the city development processes.
Understanding the challenge
When I started researching social challenges related to urban development in Gothenburg I found that certain groups of citizens, especially cultural practitioners, felt that their values and activities were neglected or ignored in city development projects. I started to talk to local residents to understand more, and found that cultural activities had to move or close to make room for new development in the city. Citizens experienced a gentrification that pushed away certian activities which led to mistrust towards city authorities and to lack of participation in the existing dialogue processes.
I talked to city officials at The City of Gothenburg to understand their perspective. They wished to improve the trust of citizens but they struggled with ways to share information in efficient ways, and with methods that engaged broad participation. These challenges became the design challenges the pilot project aimed to address
Design opportunity
The Urban Digital Twin of Gothenburg, Virtual Gothenburg, holds the advantages of communicating complex systems and relationships, and of visualising invisible factors in a city such as air pollution, noise levels, etc. We asked ourselves in the project if Virtual Gothenburg also could be used to visualise other invisible aspects that citizens experience as neglected, such as social and cultural values? Could it be used as a citizen dialogue tool between citizens and city authorities?
Understanding the context
With these questions in mind I spent time in a neighbourhood targeted for major redevelopment, but where the cultural and social activities had been prioritised to organically continue to develop. I ran workshops and created cultural probes to understand what people in the area valued in their surroundings and how they communicated those values. I interviewed local residents and city planners to understand how the current citizen dialogue processes work.
I found tight relationships between certain factors in the area, and the concerns in the area such as values, feelings and ideology. For example, the fact that the soil in the area is toxic from industry pollution made it impossible to build residential houses in the area, which further avoided exploitation and kept the rents low. This enabled for cultural practitioners to afford spaces in the area, and created a free and progressive space where no contradictive interests opposed the organic, DIY development of subcultures to thrive. If the toxic soil would be removed and the area "cleaned", the vibe and subculture would die.
Exploring ideas
The toxic soil of the area is an enabler for the cultural activities and the social values of the place. Could these kind of invisible relationships between facts and concerns be visualised in Virtual Gothenburg? I started to sketch on ideas of how the digital twin of Gothenburg could be used to highlight important social dependencies in urban development processes.
Clashing interests.
One of the hardest parts was that the interests of the involved stakeholders clashed. City planners wanted to use new technologies for quicker and more efficient processes, and ideas that would fit their current processes. Residents worried about not being heard in current processes, about data ownership and losing their community spaces if the processes didn't consider their voices.
New iterations
These clashes made us explore tools that would make it easier for people to see and talk about these different viewpoints. We started to brainstorm around various mixed reality ideas. The ideas that used Augmented Really (AR) were particularly interesting as AR addressed the needs of the user groups by augment/add value to the real world with digital elements, instead of the opposite. I built prototypes exploring how Augmented Reality (AR) could allow people to “see” values like stories, concerns, and memories, placed in the actual locations where they mattered. For example, someone’s feeling of safety in a park could appear as an AR layer others could experience.
Sketches and prototypes of AR ideas was used in workshops with the City of Gothenburg to get input on how such technology could be used and add value in their dialogue processes. By visualising values in public space, the tools helped spark conversations that wouldn’t normally happen in a meeting room or planning document.
Design outcomes
The result was a prototype that aimed to provoke a new way of thinking about how urban digital twins and AR can support public dialogue and decision-making. It was a prototype of a citizen dialogue service called "Augment Your City" in the format of an app distributed by the City of Gothenburg. It worked as an interface between the real physical Gothenburg and the digital twin of Gothenburg and enabled for citizens to add personal perspectives to the digital twin, and for city authorities to communicate with citizens and learn about place-specific values.
City officials could use the Augment Your City service to place questions to citizens in specific areas. The questions would be visible in AR in the physical place and digitally in the digital twin and possible for citizens to interact with.
Citizens could use Augment Your City to answer city questions, contribute with personal perspectives, telling place-specific stories and share memories or feelings about a place in their own creative way. Shared content would be visible in AR in the physical place, and virtually visible in the same place in the digital twin.
Recognition
The work ended up being featured in the book Urban Digital Twins, Geodesign and Futures by Paul Cureton and Elliot Hartley. They highlighted it as an example of how digital planning tools can do more than simulate buildings, they can help us talk about the kind of cities we want to live in together with citizens.
