See Your City, Change Your City
CityLens is a civic engagement platform designed to help neighbourhood residents understand the often invisible systems—like traffic, electricity, water, and waste—that shape daily life and require shared responsibility. By making these systems more visible, CityLens supports informed, collective decision-making.
Residents can explore questions such as: How does the traffic work ? Where does your water come from? What happens to your waste? How is electricity generated and distributed? Are there service disparities linked to wealth? Everyday actions—like turning on a light—have wider environmental impacts.
Why
For democracy to thrive, people must understand the systems they live within. CityLens offers tools to build awareness, challenge myths, and empower residents to help shape more inclusive, sustainable neighbourhoods.
How
The current implementation is only exploring the question of what would be the effect of introducing a 30 km/h speed limit in our neighborhood. The map content, representing the neighborhood, is projected onto the table, and the user interacts with it via physical objects (e.g., speed limit signs) and observe the changes via different lenses.
One way to gain insight is through the data lens, which provides more context. Another is through the diagnostic lens, which lets users experience what it might feel like to live there by listening to the sound of the streets. The idea is that, by using different lenses, users can gain multiple points of views.
CityLens can be integrated into urban and public spaces to provide insights into the invisible systems we live in and are collectively responsible for.
