The city of Narva is preparing the new masterplan and one of the core strategies is to make the city attractive and livable for the youth. Yet, young people are elusive to traditional surveys and they seldom enjoy participatory processes.
For this project we have teamed up with Linnalabor to realised the image of the city according to the city’s youth and proactively engaged with them to realise their collective vision for Narva.
The image of the city
The Kevin Lynch approach is definitely one of the best way to map the perceive image of the city. Yet, when engaging with youth, it would require a minimum amount of training. At the same time there was the need to compare the results of similar survey dating 10 years ago in Narva that was principally focused on mapping places the places that are liked and not liked by the youth. This limited the scope of our project but nonetheless we have successfully engaged with all the majors schools in the city, from elementary schools to gymnasium and technical schools.
Our survey was designed with Maptionnaire as it allowed us to keep the students interested in the mapping task and it allow us to complete the survey in just 30 minutes. After the survey was completed we have extracted the data in GIS format and designed technical cartographies for city planners. Yet, these are hardly readable by the general public and they are not great at communicating the results. Eventually we have redesigned the cartography to be at the same time readable, engaging and truthful to the underlying goedata.
Youth vision
It is cognitively and practically challenging to ask young people to image the city they would like to live in and at the same time have them drawing it. To have a clear understanding of what the youth may want for their future, and to do so in just 30 minutes, we have utilised a classic game-like survey. To have an active engagement we have developed a deck of cards with urban design solution, mobility modes and activities. Students had to pick their most wanted cards=futures. To make the results attractive and engaging, we have statistically analysed the results of the game an realised an artist’s impression of the city according to the youth’s card selection.
