Product research & development for community participation in placemaking.
Sidewalk Labs is an Alphabet company that improves quality of life in cities by incubating technology for place-based sustainability, affordability, and social infrastructure.
I worked in product and business development on the civic innovation team, focused on early-stage R&D for digital tools for civic participation. I led a year-long research and product development process to advance the company’s nascent civic tech investment thesis.
I led a lean R&D, product strategy, design, and prototyping process for a digital toolkit for civic participation in urban planning and real estate development.
COLLAB TOOLKIT: PRODUCT CONCEPT
A digital toolkit for equitable, participatory, and efficient neighborhood planning and development.
User problem: Community engagement in urban planning and real estate development is an inaccessible and broken process that spurs distrust, miscommunication, underrepresentation, and counterproductive dynamics, leading to growing resistance to development (NIMBYism) and canceled projects. These vicious cycles impede key quality of life components in urban communities: affordable housing, economic growth, civic engagement, and social infrastructure.
Business insights: Developers who want to do inclusive engagement struggle with political acceptance for their participation exercises and want to partner with cities on this work. Forward thinking city government agencies and developers lack tools to move the needle on root cause barriers to meaningful and representative participation, and participatory planning is increasingly seen as a critical competitive advantage. Across the board, potential users expressed that better technology can raise the bar for participation and set new standards in a space that’s ripe for change.
Learnings: There’s a significant opportunity to generate higher quality participation through thoughtful technology-based solutions that are both 1) purpose-built for real estate and land use planning and 2) capable of scaling. Next generation placemakers are changing the tide, and they need values-aligned tools that help activate their vision for inclusive and participatory cities.
FEATURES
Mobilize Neighborhood Networks
Collab’s platform coordinates and mobilizes neighborhood engagement networks that connect city planners, community organizations, and developers with community members.
Online and Offline Outreach and Engagement
City planners and community leaders can easily reach their constituents to participate and co-create their community vision for the neighborhood, using online and offline outreach channels and multilingual engagement materials like surveys, polls, and asset mapping that make planning and real estate relevant, accessible, and compelling. These materials are purpose-built for planning and development, and help educate communities on the benefits, trade offs, and constraints for change in their neighborhood. Sidewalk Labs Proprietary Information 1 Shared Data and Accountability Collab’s shared platform tracks outreach performance, participant demographic representation, and community input insights in a centralized, transparent, and collaborative live dashboard for city planners, community leaders, and developers. Save Time & Money Collab saves these teams time and money by making outreach, communications, and feedback analysis faster and more effective, leading to more efficient engagement operations, smoother project approval, and long-term community stewardship.
Shared Data and Accountability
Collab’s shared platform tracks outreach performance, participant demographic representation, and community input insights in a centralized, transparent, and collaborative live dashboard for city planners, community leaders, and developers.
Save Time & Money
Collab saves these teams time and money by making outreach, communications, and feedback analysis faster and more effective, leading to more efficient engagement operations, smoother project approval, and long-term community stewardship.
OUTCOMES
For cities: Smarter neighborhood plans
Make development and land use conversations more relevant and accessible to get more people bought into engaging with long range planning and real estate.
Hear from a larger and more representative audience with less time spent on outreach and feedback analysis.
Build trust and ownership in the overall process, leading to more valuable projects and thriving communities.
For Developers: Smarter project proposals
Realtime, hyperlocal priorities and sentiment context to inform the diligence and site selection process.
Hear from a larger and more representative audience with less time spent on outreach and feedback analysis. Garner more actionable, rich feedback to incorporate into project plans with less time spent on outreach and feedback analysis.
Build trust and ownership in the overall process, leading to more valuable projects and thriving communities. Demonstrate representative participation to build legitimacy in the entitlements process.
(Product design and concept are property of Sidewalk Labs)