PlaceChangers, as a company, has been going for an incredible three years now. Since PlaceChangers was founded back in 2015 we believed that there must be a better (read: more ‘user-friendly’) way to plan cities, with more engaging, participatory, compelling and easy means for anybody communicate.

The company was founded based on years of research, including observations of and interviews with public planners, local residents, developers, and other professional actors; and this demonstrated a general lack of tools and approaches for city planning that lives up to the advances in modern that have happened, say, in everyday life.

While ‘planning’ as a term can at times invoke a feeling of ambiguity, we take the view that it fundamentally is about communication, and a very natural set of actions, some of it formalised, and a lot of it unspoken. In this, new types of digital representation and social media can help reach even more individuals and offer build neighbourhoods and cities.

If you believe planning could and should be more engaging and accessible for all actors, then this blog is for you. And actors are of course diverse. They might be hard-working planners at the city council doing the best for their city and its citizens; they equally might be the passionate community representatives that have not been trained in the profession, or they might be a developer who offers projects to the local area.

In all of this, our focus is on re-engaging with planning in visual, interactive ways; that gives life to a planning proposal, or that makes different courses of action in a local area understandable.

The PlaceChangers’ blog aims to provide value by sharing best practice and helpful insights for those interested in city development. There will be a blend of topics speaking to public engagement and involvement, the role of design, and new interactive opportunities, that enable to introduce a human touch to planning. We hope articles will be relevant and helpful not only to our existing clients.

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