In partnership with The New City Collective (Uusi Kaupunki Kollektiivi) and the City of Lahti, their “City Center Vision 2040” was brought to life. By providing real-time generative visualizations during a major civic festival, the project helped citizens and politicians turn abstract ideas into concrete visual goals, effectively bridging the gap between public participation and official decision-making.
Context
Client
Uusi Kaupunki Kollektiivi,
City of Lahti
Location
Lahti, Finland 🇫🇮
Year
2023
The City of Lahti is on a mission to transform its downtown into a highly vibrant, welcoming destination through its comprehensive “City Center Vision 2040” initiative. Leading up to the final stages of the project, the city had already gathered extensive feedback through online surveys, youth programs and business owners meetings.
However, planners faced a common urban development challenge: how to distill this massive volume of abstract feedback into cohesive, actionable goals. To close out the ideation phase, the city needed a dynamic way to help both everyday residents and local politicians clearly visualize what these proposed changes would actually look like in the real world, ensuring everyone was aligned before final decisions were made.
Engagement method
The “Future Festival” (Tulevaisuusfestarit), an open-house event held at Lahti City Hall in November 2023, served as the peak of the city’s engagement efforts. Co-organized in partnership with Nordic Works, the festival provided a venue for various stations focused on the development of Lahti’s city center. At the AI station, attendees tackled key urban themes: integrating blue-green infrastructure and designing new city landmarks.
Rather than navigating the software themselves, participants conversed directly with an urban design expert. While participants shared descriptions of their perfect city center, an expert employed an AI co-planning tool to provide immediate urban visualizations of three target sites, directly reflecting the participants’ suggestions. This collaborative, real-time iteration sparked rich discussions, allowing participants to compare multiple scenarios side-by-side and collectively agree on their favorite future concepts.
Impact
The deployment of the tool significantly elevated the city’s master planning process, demonstrating the profound value of AI in facilitating complex public discussions.
- Accelerated Ideation: The ability to swiftly and iteratively visualize ideas added immediate depth and nuance to citizen aspirations, introducing innovative spatial concepts that might have otherwise been lost in text-based surveys.
- Bridging the Communication Gap: The generated visualizations served as a powerful universal language. They successfully bridged the traditional divide between grassroots participatory processes and high-level political decision-making, ensuring stakeholder inputs were translated into actionable strategies.
- Empowered Collective Visioning: By proving that resident input could be rapidly translated into tangible architectural strategies, the project reinforced trust in the planning process, ensuring the final City Center Vision 2040 is built on a truly shared community mandate.
Delivered together with project partners.