Map-based survey gives citizens a voice in public development projects

Europe spends billions of euros on the renovation of urban spaces, public infrastructure and transport systems. Yet citizens are often left out of the development process. Public participation and collaboration with elected officials can help new public projects to fully achieve their goals. With the support of DG REGIO funding, the PARTIMAP project developed a new participatory mapping survey that makes urban development more inclusive. To find out more, DG REGIO spoke to István Pósfai of K-Monitor, part of PARTIMAP’s project consortium.

Can you provide a brief overview of the PARTIMAP initiative and its objectives? What inspired the creation of this project?

As an anti-corruption NGO, K-Monitor believes that the best antidotes to corruption in society are transparent decision-making and the active participation of citizens in public affairs.. These principles behind our work, coupled with the organisation’s technological focus, have already led us to develop several tools that facilitate public participation. PARTIMAP is our most recent and ambitious effort. By targeting urban development decisions that have the most direct impact on the daily lives of residents, the tool aims to bridge a perceived mismatch between the reach of digital technologies and the scope of public consultations in both our Hungarian and a regional context.

Urban spaces evolve constantly, be it squares, parks, public transportation hubs, roads or bicycle paths. These spaces have practical roles in the city's functioning, but also foster communities and can become part of a city’s identity, reputation and culture. Thus it is crucial that urban development projects represent the needs and interests of those who use them and that citizens can identify with the results of such interventions. There are some social consultation processes for developments funded by the EU, but they are quite formal. Meaningful stakeholder involvement is rare. Even then, it usually only happens offline and manages to attract limited attention from citizens.

PARTIMAP is a free and open source map-based survey tool that aims to make citizen participation easier, more efficient and more widely accessible. The goal was to create a platform that could be used by a variety of public bodies, individual municipal representatives, or even local civil society initiatives to gather the invaluable knowledge of local stakeholders about the spaces they use everyday. We wanted to give people access to a free, user-friendly interface so that online public consultation can become more accessible and resident involvement can become a necessity rather than an extravagance.

The original development of PARTIMAP was funded by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG REGIO), under a 2020 call to develop or scale up tools and actions that engage citizens in the implementation of the EU’s cohesion policy. In 2023, the site was translated into English. Since it is open source, interested parties have translated it to Spanish and Lithuanian as well. So far, more than 200 people have built surveys on PARTIMAP; most of these users are from Hungary, but there have also been successful projects in Turkey and Paraguay. The increasing number of users confirms the relevance of combining surveys and maps in this manner and that this methodological innovation is slowly becoming standard procedure in local democracy.

How does PARTIMAP address the challenge of limited public consultation in development projects, and how does it empower citizens to have a meaningful say in these initiatives?

The baseline idea of PARTIMAP was to enable public consultations to go online, to be accessible for a wider range of stakeholders. This doesn’t mean we consider PARTIMAP to be a substitute for in-person forums and consultations, but it should lower the threshold for joining such a process from a citizen perspective. However, this presupposes that the public body conducting the consultation is actually interested in receiving a wide range of responses: even if a survey is published online, delivering it to citizens and making them aware that their input is expected on a certain project remains a significant challenge. We aim to address this issue with regular training sessions, not only providing assistance on how to use the tool, but also sharing information on professional survey methods and good practices of information campaigns.

PARTIMAP can gather information through traditional survey methods, but its main added value is that respondents of the survey can add their own markings to a map, which the app then collates for the survey owner. Compared to respondents simply being offered a limited number of survey options, this enables more profound and significant interactions amongst stakeholders and decision makers. We also made an effort from the beginning to make the results available to people who fill out the questionnaire, with the owner’s permission. This can help to develop discourse around the issue under consideration, as the data are not only available to the decision-maker but can also be accessed by stakeholders. Contributors find the process more intriguing when they can get a behind-the-scenes look.

Can you share some of the key challenges PARTIMAP has faced in its development and implementation, and how were these challenges addressed?

One specific challenge we continue to face while developing PARTIMAP is the trade-off between user-friendliness and the complex functions we wish the tool to be capable of. We had a pretty good idea of the basic functions we wanted the tool to have and managed to translate these requests into a logic possible for a backend developer to work with. But it was more difficult to attach the user experience (UX) attributes along the way. This was complicated further by the fact that most survey respondents primarily use a mobile phone to complete surveys and mobile compatibility is another difficult area of IT development that is fairly resource intensive.

Being an anti-corruption group, we frequently communicate with authorities and mayors. However, municipal enterprises, along with their specialists and subcontractors, are the primary users of this tool. Getting to know this target group's real-world viewpoints expanded our horizons while also providing a challenge.

PARTIMAP acknowledges the importance of considering both professional considerations and the needs of the public in development projects. How does the platform facilitate collaboration between professionals and citizens? Can you share a specific example where this collaborative approach has resulted in a successful and well-balanced development project?

A PARTIMAP questionnaire is just one component of the social consultation or community planning process. The platform can also accept complicated statements of thought from the public. We have also released a methodological handbook in Hungarian that covers the basics of participatory mapping and questionnaire design.

PARTIMAP can be used during various phases of a development project. The ‘troubleshooting’ function can show what stakeholders perceive as local issues, users can also test project ideas, and even receive feedback during a more mature phase of the project.

One way professionals and citizens can interact via PARTIMAP is the so-called ‘static map’ function, where the survey owner can present various options to respondents, which might already be the result of professional considerations. PARTIMAP can also reveal the pros and cons of certain options to citizens, such as budget implications, while receiving their feedback. Citizen responses can also be collected, analysed by professionals and then published with meaningful responses. Citizens or activists can also use map-based surveys to gather and formulate the interest of a community and advocate decision makers based on the results.

The project worked closely with municipalities in Budapest as well as the Hungarian Cyclists' Club. K-Monitor cooperated with the Centre for Budapest Transport (BKK) to use the tool to plan the expansion of its public bike network BUBI. Planning firms increasingly use PARTIMAP to plan and strategize infrastructure developments in various parts of Hungary. We are continuously processing their feedback, learning from them to make the tool smarter.

Looking ahead, what are the envisioned future developments or expansions for PARTIMAP? How do you see the initiative evolving to further enhance its impact on community development and citizen engagement in the coming years?

We have several next steps in mind. The most important would be to review it based on user feedback and UX considerations, to make it more user friendly. Our goal is to build a low-threshold yet effective questionnaire design. We want PARTIMAP to be as simple to use as other free questionnaire interfaces, while also providing additional support to the questionnaire owner to help them create a viable, effective survey.

We also plan to invest more in the marketing of the tool to make sure all interested stakeholders know about its existence and understand its advantages. We also hope that it will be translated into further languages and we’re able to learn about use cases we did not even envision. This could establish the foundation for another bigger round of developments.