Consat
Designed by Helsinki-based Mapita, Maptionnaire is a map-based software tool that helps urban planners run community-engagement surveys. Its many applications include improving traffic flow and safety, improving green spaces and walkability, making it easier for locals to find electric vehicle charging stations and assessing crop damage.
Mapita was founded in 2011 when a group of urban-planning researchers came to the realisation that the future of urban planning had to be built around public engagement, particularly from local residents. This input had to be reliable and derived from a user-friendly platform that was able to take an evidence-based barometer of public opinion and which, crucially, could be used by anyone, anywhere. Maptionnaire is the product of this insight and has, over the years, developed from a map-based questionnaire tool to a fully fledged community and citizen engagement platform, equipped with the capability to collect data, communicate plans and implement collective decision-making.
The breadth of Maptionnaire’s applicability is vast. It has been used all over the world, from Australia and Canada to Mauritius and Mexico, in spheres as varied as energy and climate action, community cohesion and dedicated research projects. This versatility is further exemplified by the range in scale of its projects. Maptionnaire was one of the partners for the Pavilion of Finland at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia in 2022. In this capacity, Maptionnaire interactively mapped where prefabricated wooden houses by Finnish industrial enterprise Puutalo Oy have been exported, receiving 2,600 responses. This contributed to the Finland Pavilion’s exhibition display by showing the geographical distribution of Puutalo Oy projects in a visually engaging way for Biennale attendees.
“Maptionnaire is the product of this insight and has, over the years, developed from a map-based questionnaire tool to a fully fledged community and citizen engagement platform, equipped with the capability to collect data, communicate plans and implement collective decision-making”
On a larger scale, the Secretariat of Citizen Participation and Planning of the State of Jalisco in Mexico engaged more than 45,000 participants using a Maptionnaire survey to provide their opinions on perennial transport problems on López Mateos Avenue in Guadalajara. Maptionnaire made it easy for residents to access and fill in the survey on their devices through the use of technology such as QR codes, which were conveniently placed in public locations encouraging locals to provide their feedback. These results could then be filtered through various demographics, heatmaps, graphs and map-based data visualisations, helping the Jalisco state planning authorities draw rich, evidence-based conclusions in a uniquely accessible and convenient way.
Projects such as these have helped Mapita on the way to fulfilling its mission: to make Maptionnaire the best and most recognised digital community-engagement platform in the world. Having already been named Smart City Kasvupolku Winner 2019 and a Smart 50 Award Recipient for Transformative Work in Smart Cities 2020, Maptionnaire won Geospatial World Innovator of the Year 2023 and has been named in the Global Top 100 Geospatial Companies 2023 by Geo Awesome. In the context of the move towards smart cities, Maptionnaire’s facility to provide reliable, fast and data-led solutions to the 21st century’s issues will make it a vital tool for researchers, urban planners and consultancies who are committed to improving the practices of public participation to create better cities to live in.
