Come and join the Open Plans community on Thursday, May 1st for a festive celebration of the people behind our city’s defining public spaces.

• place-based
• city

• Awards and prizes
• Urban planning

A floating glowing cloud of LED-embedded balloons that listens out for electromagnetic waves in the sky.

• place-based

• Artistic interventions
• Hardware

Nieman Journalism Lab covered ProPublica's brilliant approach to getting government sources: parking one of those billboard trucks with an ad for their secure Signal number outside of government offices in DC as terminated employees left the building.

• place-based
• Project 2025

• Media
• Journalism
• Whistleblowing

EFF’s Street-Level Surveillance project shines a light on the surveillance technologies that law enforcement agencies routinely deploy in our communities.

• surveillance
• place-based
• guides

• Artificial Intelligence
• Legal tech
• Tech for Bad Hall of Shame

Agency For Urban Change

• youth
• city
• place-based

• Participatory democracy
• User experience

The SAGA Smart Machinaka Project is a demonstration project that aims to improve the convenience of the city center of Saga City through the use of technologies such as AI and IoT, and to create a city that is easy to live in.

• city
• place-based
• Sustainable cities and communities

• Artificial Intelligence
• Smart Cities and sensors
• Dashboards

In plain language, tell Sidekick what you want to know and get answers straight from the mySidewalk data library.

• place-based

• Artificial Intelligence
• Urban planning

A global atlas of case studies of tech-enabled urban districts and municipal digital masterplans.

• place-based
• city
• Sustainable cities and communities

• Civic tech catalogs
• Smart Cities and sensors
• Urban planning

Spatial Equity NYC (SE), a tool developed by MIT’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) in close collaboration with New York City-based nonprofit Transportation Alternatives (TA), visualizes mobility, environment, and health data.

• city
• place-based
• Reduced inequalities

• Civic data
• Data visualization
• Civic maps

Find out for free what is being built and knocked down in your area and receive email alerts when something new is planned.

• place-based

• Urban planning
• Service alerts
• Communicating with the people

We help people avoid getting ticketed and towed when they park on the street through simple SMS alerts.

• mobility
• streetscape
• place-based

• Consumer watchdogging
• Service alerts

Infrastructure Space was established in 2017 to acknowledge the infrastructural turn in architectural theory, to embrace the thinking and methods established in L+U and [Re_Map] and to explore new territory, specifically the interface between digital communications, infrastructure and the production of space no longer limited to urban contexts, but accepting the often intangible manufactured nature of most British landscapes.

• Industry, innovation, and infrastructure
• city
• place-based

• Civic data
• Urban planning

"an end-to-end open-source framework for creating georeferenced pedestrian networks from aerial imagery"

• place-based
• streetscape
• Good health and well-being

• Satellites
• Urban planning
• Peer-reviewed research

IT for Change’s Namma Mahiti Kendras are ICT-enabled information centers that aim to break down the barriers to citizens’ right-claiming processes.

• place-based

• Engagement tech
• Access social benefits
• Communicating with the people

Openly mapping for the pedestrian experience.

• place-based
• city
• OpenStreetMap

• Civic data
• Civic maps
• Assistive and Accessible Tech

Monument Lab is a nonprofit public art and history studio based in Philadelphia. We cultivate and facilitate critical conversations around the past, present, and future of monuments.

• history
• place-based
• culture

• Artistic interventions

Documenting the use of defensive urban design in the Greater Toronto Area and beyond.

• city
• place-based
• Sustainable cities and communities

• Artistic interventions
• Archives

Crowdsourced mapping of cultural locations in Sweden

• culture
• history
• place-based

• Mapping tools
• Crowdsourcing

Map-based surveys with sentiment visualization

• place-based

• Mapping tools
• Surveys & polling

Baltimore City Council Bill 19-0429 requires the Department of Housing & Community Development to post signage on vacant buildings that will identify owners so that they can be held accountable by the public.

• housing
• place-based

• Cameras

It is the strategic integration of arts, culture and community engaged design into comprehensive community planning and development.

• place-based

• The People
• Fellowships
• Find a job or hire someone

Organising community involvement with road safety on a grand scale

• road safety
• speeding
• Vision Zero

• Help out
• Crowdsourcing
• Support civic projects with tech

Digital Trust for Places & Routines (DTPR) is an open-source communication standard to increase the transparency, legibility and accountability of digital technology in the built environment.

• place-based
• city
• Sustainable cities and communities

• Emerging tech
• Digital security and privacy
• Smart Cities and sensors

PlaceSpeak is a location-based citizen engagement platform that authenticates the online public participation process through digital credentials and privacy-by-design to build trust.

• place-based

• The Tech
• Govtech
• Engagement tech

“Overall we believe the world we live in is facing radical change – and our aim is to help find positive futures in the face of that change.”

• place-based

• The Tech
• Civic tech catalogs

Urban Archive is a technology nonprofit that creates new connections between people, places, and historical institutions.

• apps
• history
• place-based

• The Tech
• Civic data
• Media