Digitising co-creation for urban planning

"Property developers and local authorities must consult communities before submitting urban planning applications (buildings, road closures etc.). They must show how they consulted and addressed comments from the community. While this is a legal requirement, response rates to planning consultation are only around 3% of the local population with particularly low engagement amongst under 44 year olds.

The recent Grenfell tragedy shows how there is an urgent need to provide better tools to improve community engagement, specifically amongst the private sector. On the wake of the disaster, property lawyer Susan Freeman said: ""_as a developer you have to be aware of the importance of engaging the community. \[The past events\] have raised additional questions and people are more sensitive to what they have to do to engage communities._""

Through our experience of delivering urban improvement projects for more than 5 years we found that co-creation methods are fundamentally more effective than standard consultation. Co-creation leads to higher participation rates, better buy-in from communities and better proposals. However, current co-creation methods are manual, intensive, and hence non-scalable. Our customer discovery showed that the industry wants to implement co-creation with communities but high costs limits its adoption.

Our vision is to digitize co-creation for urban planning, reduce its costs and integrate it with engagement and consultation.

The project's aim is to design and test early prototypes of a new digital co-creation tools. This will help us secure investment in 2019 and continue feasibility and development."