How to Influence Urban Planning Decisions from Below

What made you decide to start TransformCity? Was there a particular moment that sealed the decision for you? Yes, there was a specific moment. I had been working on my ZO!City project for a few years already, and actually, it was around Christmas time between 2012 and 2013. I was getting to a point with ZO!City where the local network, the local information and the willingness that we encountered in the project was becoming so large that I was becoming the weakest link in the organization that I had built myself. So I thought there are so many people in this area who have ideas and who would like to do something, but they have no idea who to address, apart from me. And I was just this old-fashioned, telephone central link who was connecting everybody. I realized that was crazy. If I really wanted to organize this area in a sustainable way, I needed a much smarter solution to make sure that all the different people in this area have access to the same information and have access to each other and can exchange ideas and resources – so that they can self-organize instead of asking me all the time to organize everything for them. There was a lot of energy going to waste, a lot of ideas that people told me about that I would have liked to help to make happen. And I thought, wow. If this local community had been connected directly to each other, then it would have been so much stronger and so much more effective. And that’s when I started to think that I needed to organize something that is not me in the middle but instead the network itself is in the middle. That’s when I started to think about what kinds of functionalities should be integrated in that solution, which led to the idea of making TransformCity. What kind of stakeholders are involved in your projects? In most of Amsterdam, there is a ground lease construction so the ground is owned by the municipality but they lease the ground to private real estate owners. And in this particular office district, the real estate owners are mostly commercial, like investors or pension funds. It’s a very international, very diverse group of companies. And at the time when I adopted the area, there were 120 office buildings and they were owned by 80 different owners that were rented out by a few hundred companies and 26,000 individual people were actually working there. That was a very fragmented and complex stakeholder web. But at the same time, all those stakeholders had an interest in the area, which means together they have a lot of potential capital that you could tap into, and that’s what we did. is an architect by education and founded TransformCity, a digital platform connecting the municipalities with the different stakeholders of local projects. Could you briefly tell us a bit more about the kind of services that TransformCity provides? TransformCity takes all the different functionalities, stakeholders and data that we believe are relevant for the urban planning and development in one specific area and integrate it into one tool that helps to organize the whole process. Instead of having 10 different apps doing a little bit and having different data visualization sites, we aimed to design one Swiss army knife for your city where you have all these things into one solution. We found out is not a very IT thing to do, because a lot of IT entrepreneurs and investors told us, “No, this is too complex. You should stick to single purpose. You do only engagement, only data or only funding.” But when we talk to cities, they are actually very happy with this integral solution. It makes it much more easy for them to manage, but also to keep their community engaged. You will lose more people, the more apps you need them to download and the more platforms you need them to stay up-to-date with. We wanted to organize this whole process into one platform where all these different stakeholders – the citizens, businesses, organizations, real estate owners, government – can directly exchange information, plans and ideas with each other. Everybody is informed and engaged and can take their own informed decisions or intervene and share ideas. Could you talk a bit more about the business model behind it? Yes, I can. But first, I should explain that there is a distinction I have to make between the business model of ZO!City our pilot project in Amsterdam South East, and TransformCity, the online platform. Our business model for ZO!City is that we handed out memberships to real estate owners and adding a contribution from the municipality to it. So it is funded by real estate owners in the area, I think somewhere between 25-30% of them are part of it, so we don’t have all of them but it is growing now we have the platform. They pay an annual contribution in order to help the whole area to move forward. And the municipality is adding money to that, because they see value in a self-organized community like this, creating a more resilient area that is able to take co-ownership when things change. Things will probably keep changing in our cities, probably even faster and more fundamentally than we’re used to now. The municipality wants to make sure that the city can cope with those changes. They really value the idea of having a well-connected local community, so there’s a way of collaborating. ZO!City is a very local model and then we built the TransformCity platform, which is still in its first pilot stage. It’s not yet complete and we have things that we still want to improve. But since the pilot has been running, we had a lot of cities that showed interest in using the platform for their own local challenges. We are working towards a license model so that cities can pay an annual license to use the platform locally. Depending on what they prefer, they can provide it as a public service, which I think it should be. But they can also still bring in local real estate owners, for example, by paying something for having a better representation online. But that would be up to that particular city. Important is that we don’t charge individuals for using it, we don’t extract data or charge more money for more clicks. It is meant to be transparent, the city pays for it and then people can simply use it. It’s difficult enough to engage your people and your stakeholders, so you don’t want them to have to pay for it.