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Nyhamnen Masterplan poject was a collaboration with White Arkitekter and the City of Malmö. The foundation of community engagement in this project was the implementation of generative AI solutions, which simplified the process for residents to create visions for the future of the district.
In the redevelopment of Malmö’s Nyhamnen district, one of the core challenges was fostering meaningful and inclusive citizen engagement in the urban planning process. Traditional consultation methods often fail to reach diverse communities or spark genuine participation, so the project aimed to reimagine how residents could be involved from the start. The team sought to go beyond surface-level input, creating dynamic and accessible ways for people of all backgrounds to contribute ideas and explore possibilities. This meant simplifying how citizens could express their visions for the area and ensuring they had clear, interactive access to the initial planning proposals. The ultimate challenge lay in transforming abstract urban concepts into tangible experiences, allowing people to truly understand, interact with, and shape the future of their neighbourhood.
We believe informing citizens is the key first step to good participation. As part of the PublicTwin platform, we created an interactive digital-twin-based presentation of the White Arkitekter concept for Nyhamnen's renovation.
This allowed citizens to get familiar with the proposal through interactive means, either at home, as the project was available to anyone online, or during the exhibition organized at Form/Design Center.
The information layer was only the first step. We created a participatory module that with a help of generative AI enabled citizens to create visions of the future, based on 5 photographs from the interesting sites, geolocated in the digital-twin. Those creations were sent to an interactive gallery in which we enabled engagement through the possibility of upvoting favourite visions. This voting was also accessible via mobile version of the platform.
Final results were translated into a report presented to the city of Malmo as a potential foundation for ideas for the redevelopment of the area.
The project will have its continuity in specific areas of the masterplan where citizens will be engaged on more targeted topics of interest.
Citizen participation stood at the heart of this project, not as an add-on but as a driving force shaping its design and execution. To ensure broad and meaningful engagement, a hybrid approach was adopted—blending physical and digital experiences to meet people where they are. An open public exhibition ran for nearly three months, serving as both a visual showcase and an interactive entry point into the district’s transformation. Complementing this, citizens could participate anytime via a mobile voting platform and a 24/7 accessible desktop and tablet application, making engagement as flexible and inclusive as possible. To deepen the quality of input and guide the process, a series of curated workshops were also held, creating space for more structured dialogue and co-creation. This multi-channel strategy ensured that participation wasn’t just possible—it was intuitive, inspiring, and…
