What is the goal of the project?

Cities are shifting from top-down development of new areas towards transformation and densification of existing ones. As a local government you have limited property in these areas and in order to reach your local development goals and boost resilience on issues like real estate, public space, energy and mobility, you need on-going and active collaboration with the different local stakeholders. A new way of working is essential for you and your team to effectively manage these increasingly complex processes while maximizing the societal impact of your work. Our award-winning and fully interactive online platform brings together all stakeholders and the local government to directly share and discuss data, plans, ideas and resources and collaborate on local projects. The platform helps you to build a local community and empower it to structurally self-organise.

What is the result of the project?

The result of our first pilot (ZO!City) is two-fold. First result is the successful transformation of Amstel3 office district from monofunctional area with ca. 30% vacancy rate into a lively mixed-use urban neighbourhood. Second result is a well-connected, informed, inspired and activated neighbourhood consisting of various stakeholder groups that is self-organising and resilient to change. We believe the platform needs at least two years of implementation and intensive local coordination in order to achieve this, especially the latter.

Who initiated the project and which organizations are involved?

Transformcity was founded by Saskia Beer, an Amsterdam-based urban entrepreneur (trained architect). She developed the concept during eight years of pioneering with collaborative urban development in Amstel3 office district in Amsterdam. She built the first test pilot with the help of the local community of real estate owners, the municipality and a national subsidy (Beter Benutten). Now Transformcity is a Startup in Residence and the City of Amsterdam became its official launching customer. The platform is now being further developed from pilot to fully scalable software service and will be implemented, starting in the areas Amstel3 and Sloterdijk2. We have a research collaboration with Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and TU Eindhoven, they will research and monitor us the coming three years and support us with co-design and (rapid) prototyping.

What is the next step?

We will deliver our first phase platform in April 2018 and from then on we will deliver a live update every six weeks. In September we complete the platform in its current scope. Apart from the platform we developed a training package specifically for cities to work more collaboratively and optimise their workflow in these complex urban processes. We tested this with Amsterdam and keep finetuning. We received interest from more than 50 cities worldwide in our platform and approach, we are preparing to scale to other cities too (nationally and internationally).

What can other cities learn from your project?

Others can learn from the integral method in which our platform is implemented as a catalyst. We first built the local community and local business model and then built the platform, using input from the neighbourhood. We invested a lot in storytelling and offline activities in order to put the urban transformation on the local agenda as an accessible, relevant and fun subject to think about and engage in. This is an important success factor for the adoption of the platform. The platform can be replicated to other cities, accompanied by the training and support package for setting up a local community, internal workflow, transformation agenda and business model.

Transformcity won the second prize in the international Le Monde Smart Cities Innovation Awards 2016, category Citizen Engagement. The international high-profile jury was led by prof. Saskia Sassen.