We Proved Residents Can Map Their Cities. Now Comes the Harder Question

By Maarit Kahila, in conversation with Marketta Kyttä — May 2026

In 2006, we ran an experiment: could ordinary residents reliably produce place-based knowledge about their own cities — and could what they produced sit alongside a planner's hard geographic data? This is the story of what twenty years of that question looks like.

Public participation GIS (PPGIS), also called participatory GIS, is the use of geographic information systems to enable residents to map, contribute, and analyze place-based knowledge about their own environments. It combines residents' lived experience of place with hard geographic data, allowing planners to see not just how a city is drawn, but how it is lived. For a practical tool-level overview, see our guide to participatory mapping.

Key takeaways

• Can residents reliably produce place-based knowledge about the cities they live in — and can that knowledge be mapped, analyzed, and used alongside traditional GIS? This was the unanswered question we set out to test, twenty years ago in Finland.
• That work, published in 2006 as SoftGIS — Mapping the Perceived Quality of the Living Environment, became the foundation of what is now broadly called public participation GIS (PPGIS) — and it has traveled. The original innovation has been commercialized into Maptionnaire and a generation of comparable platforms; Marketta and a growing community of researchers have carried the academic side much further than the 2006 book imagined; and PPGIS today sits in the everyday toolkit of urban and transportation planners.
• The 2006 book was never only about collecting residents' experiential knowledge. It was about studying what kind of information can be gathered from residents, how that information can be processed and analyzed, and what the combination of soft and hard place data ultimately reveals about people's relationship to their environment and about the vitality, quality, functionality, and wellbeing of the places they live in. The interesting open question — and what this blog is about — is how deeply that same approach actually shapes the places that get built today: the new neighborhoods, redesigned corridors, renewed parks, and climate-adapted blocks that come out the other side of a planning process.
• A handful of Finnish forerunner cities — Espoo, Lahti, Vantaa, Helsinki among others — have shown what that deeper use looks like, by treating soft, place-based data as a permanent layer in their core GIS systems. The pattern they have built points to where the next twenty years of public participation GIS can go.
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What we set out to test in 2006

What if urban planning could see the places it builds the way the people who live there actually experience them? That was the question Professor Marketta Kyttä and I set out to test in Finland twenty years ago.

Marketta — Professor of Land Use Planning at Aalto University and one of the founding figures of environmental psychology applied to urban planning — had spent years working with paper sticker maps, the analog method researchers had used for decades to ask people where they felt safe, where they avoided, where they loved. The open question was whether ordinary residents could do that same kind of mapping themselves, online, in numbers a city could actually use — and whether what they produced could be brought into the same database as the city's parcels, pipes and traffic counts.

In 2006 we published the book that came out of that experiment: SoftGIS — Mapping the Perceived Quality of the Living Environment. Marketta has since described the original sequence plainly: "We started by testing whether you can produce this kind of place-based experiential knowledge from people at all. Then whether it brings something scientifically new. And only after that did we get to the question of whether it is useful for planning."

The answer to all three turned out to be yes. The innovation we started has since been commercialized into Maptionnaire and a generation of comparable platforms. Marketta and a wider community of researchers have carried the academic side much further than the 2006 book imagined. And practitioners around the world — cities, transportation agencies, consultancies — are working with PPGIS as a real, everyday part of their craft. None of what we want to discuss in this blog would be possible without that.

But the 2006 book was never only about collecting residents' experiential knowledge. It was about studying what kind of information actually comes out of residents, how that information can be processed and analyzed, what it can be combined with, and ultimately what it tells us about people's relationship to their environment and about the vitality, quality, functionality, and wellbeing of the places they live in. Twenty years on, our question is this: how deeply does that same kind of work actually shape the places that get built — the new neighborhoods, the redesigned streets, the public spaces, the climate-adapted blocks that come out the other side of a planning process? Surveys are run, results are reported. But the work of combining the data, doing the deeper analysis that turns it into evidence about what makes a place actually work for the people who live in it, has stayed largely in the hands of researchers.

This same question hides behind a lot of current planning discourse. Many consultancies and city departments now speak of human-centered design as a guiding principle — and rightly so. But human-centered design is a verb, not a virtue. It lives in the tools and methods that bring residents' knowledge of their environment to the design table, and in whether what those tools produce actually reaches a planner's drawing. So how deeply does it? That is what this blog is about.

What experiential knowledge turned out to be

The first surprise came right away. We had begun from the idea that residents would describe their environments through specific, perceivable action possibilities — a sittable bench, a climbable tree, a space affording interaction. They didn't. Residents spoke in bundles. "This place is peaceful. Safe. Child-friendly. Close to nature." A sense of closeness to nature might be made up of a window view, a footpath, a smell, a memory, and the absence of traffic noise — perceived as a whole even though it is assembled from many parts.

That early surprise opened the door to a much wider range of things PPGIS can actually capture. Four working categories of experiential knowledge are useful to think with:

Four working categories

1. Place qualities, values, and conditions — what residents perceive about the places they live: safe, restorative, peaceful, beautiful, noisy, neglected.
2. Current and historical connections to places — what places mean to people, including the identities, memories, and personal histories tied to them.
3. Everyday behavioral patterns and practices — how residents actually use the urban environment, and where the important places of daily life are.
4. Hopes for change and reactions to draft plans — how residents would want their environment to evolve, and what they think of specific proposals when shown them.
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What residents actually map — and what it reveals

What residents actually map under each of these categories turns out to be remarkably rich. Where they feel safe and where they don't. The places that restore them when stressed — often green and quiet, often surprisingly small, sometimes just a view from a kitchen window rather than a faraway forest. Where casual social encounters happen and where they don't, including the kinds of weak-tie encounters that hold the social life of a neighborhood together and can disappear without the city ever noticing. The routes daily life actually takes, versus the routes a planner assumed it would. The places children play, and the places they avoid. Beautiful blocks and ugly ones. The imposed environmental burdens — noise, traffic, pollution — that can't be opted out of, and the question of who is exposed. The 2006 book worked with dozens of such quality factors, positive and negative, and the field has refined the set since. Residents perceive many of these things at once, in overlapping ways; the planner's job is to ask the questions that bring the right layers into focus for the decision in front of them.

Each of these categories also takes on a sharper edge the moment it is combined with what the city already knows. Mapped place qualities, stratified by who answered, expose whose city is being built well and whose isn't. Patterns of everyday use reveal the actual functional geography of a neighborhood, which often differs sharply from the planned one. Mapped connections and meanings tie place to identity and to the social fabric that urban planning can either protect or erode. Mapped hopes for change and reactions to drafts make participation concrete in a way verbal hearings rarely manage. Combined with hard place data, these layers begin to do what the 2006 book set out to study: they reveal what makes a place vital, what makes it functional, what makes it good for the wellbeing of the people who live there. Together they describe a city the way it is lived, not just the way it is drawn.

The bet that mattered: connecting soft and hard data

The genuinely radical claim of the 2006 work wasn't that experiential information existed. It was that it could sit in the same database as the city's hard geographic data and be analyzed jointly. That was new.

A clear example came later in the Urban Happiness research in Helsinki, where we compared two central neighborhoods (Töölö and Kallio) with several suburban ones, and looked at how density related to perceived quality and wellbeing.

In the central neighborhoods, the story was straightforward. Higher density brought everyday services closer. Closer services correlated with higher perceived quality, and higher perceived quality with higher wellbeing. The textbook story.

In the suburbs, density also brought services closer — but the correlation with perceived quality flipped negative. The proximity of local amenities was actually associated with lower perceived environmental quality. "If your local amenity is a karaoke bar and a low-end corner shop," Marketta noted, "that isn't the same thing as a Töölö street with ground-floor restaurants and specialty shops." Same density input, opposite outcomes — because what density brought near the resident was different.

The lesson generalizes. Directly asking residents whether they like density is unreliable; the word is loaded by whichever public argument is louder that year. The more honest way to study density, and most other contested urban variables, is indirectly: measure the variable at residents' actual locations, then look at how it correlates with what they do and how they feel. That logic is what makes the soft–hard combination so valuable. Soft data on its own is sentiment. Hard data on its own is geometry. Combined, they explain.

The deeper architecture

The fuller value of a PPGIS dataset shows when it is connected to three things that turn feedback into evidence: the background variables of who answered (lifestyle, life stage, socioeconomic position); the fine-grained built-environment data that might explain the experience; and outcome variables such as neighborhood satisfaction, neighborhood attachment, perceived quality of life, perceived health, and happiness.

Several research groups in Finland and elsewhere — many of them direct continuations of the original SoftGIS work — have shown what each of those connections can do. The findings are real, replicable, and ready to inform how actual places get designed. None of this is exotic; it is what becomes available the moment soft, place-based data is treated as something a planner can actually work with alongside the rest of the city's information.

There is also a limit worth naming. PPGIS, like any voluntary digital tool, captures the residents who show up. The deeper the analysis gets, the more it matters who is missing from the data. Closing the digital divide — making sure under-heard groups aren't under-represented in what the analysis sees — is part of the same work, not a separate concern.

When walking distance isn't walking

The same logic shows up in one of today's most popular planning frames. There is now a great deal of work on which neighborhoods score well on 15-minute-city potential accessibility — how many services are within a fifteen-minute walk. There is far less work on actualized accessibility — whether residents actually use those services in their daily lives, and whether the services within reach are the kind they need. "The 15-minute services might be of the wrong type," Marketta said. "Not the ones I need."

Oulu, in northern Finland, is a useful example of actualized accessibility. In a recent comparison of a few Finnish cities, Oulu residents lived more of a "15-minute life" than residents of two larger southern cities, despite a colder climate and a less-dense urban form. One likely explanation is decades of investment in building and maintaining walking and cycling networks — most importantly the winter maintenance that turns a built path into an actually-used one.

The conclusion is old by 2006 standards, and still routinely under-applied: having a service within walking distance doesn't mean it gets walked to. What promotes walking is the experiential quality of the path. That is exactly the kind of layer PPGIS is built to add to a transportation planner's existing accessibility analysis — a concrete example of how GIS supports urban planning in practice. It is useful for everything from a Vision Zero or Safe Streets for All safety analysis to a complete-streets retrofit, where the difference between a corridor that gets walked and one that doesn't is rarely in the geometry.

What the forerunner cities are doing

The most encouraging part of the conversation was what the leading cities have built on their own initiative. "The steps forward in the best cities happened because the cities themselves invented them," Marketta said. "Not because we told them to."

In Espoo, Finland, both raw resident input and analyzed PPGIS outputs are stored inside the city's core spatial database, accessible to any planner the same way road centerlines or parcel data are. The city monitors perceived quality on a recurring multi-year cycle, so the same area can be tracked over time even though individual respondents change. The result is something close to the 2006 vision: soft, place-based data as a permanent, queryable layer of the city's GIS, available for the next plan, the next equity assessment, the next safety analysis.

There is a second pattern worth naming. Aalto research has looked at how planners who design their own PPGIS surveys end up using the data, and found that when the planner responsible for a project shapes the questions themselves, they are often able to point, afterward, to specific ways the data influenced the plan. Planner co-design is part of how soft, place-based data lands at the decision table. Standardized sets of questions — if and when good ones become widely available — would be a useful complement to that, making it possible to monitor change over time and to compare across cities. The two work in different directions rather than against each other.

It's only fair to acknowledge that the deepest practice and the most sustained research have stayed in roughly the same Finnish cities. Finland's public-sector digital infrastructure is a global outlier, and the path other cities take will look different from Espoo's. But the underlying principle travels: treat soft, place-based data as a structural layer, not as a one-off deliverable.

What comes next for the places we build

The question now isn't whether residents can produce place-based knowledge, or whether the tools exist to capture it, or whether practitioners are willing to use them. The answer to all three is yes. The question is how much residents' lived knowledge actually influences places that get built — the new neighborhoods, the redesigned corridors, the renewed parks, the climate-adapted blocks that come out the other side of a planning process.

Here is what that looks like in practice — these are just a few examples; the opportunities are many:

• Plans drafted with soft, place-based data visible from the start, alongside land use, traffic, environmental, and statistical data.
• Equity assessments that account actually carrying.
• Transportation projects — a complete-streets retrofit, a transit station, a Safe Streets for All corridor — where ridership counts tell you how much, and lived experience tells you who is using the new connection, who isn't, what the use does to their wellbeing, and — more deeply — the how and why.
• Climate-adaptation and mitigation work that knows where vulnerability is felt and lived, not only where it is statistically expected.
• Long-range visions built with the same access to social and experiential geography as to physical geography.

The new pressures on urban planning — climate adaptation, planetary health, mental health and wellbeing entering physical-planning practice, social cohesion as a planning concern — share a common requirement. None of them can be answered with hard data alone. None can be answered with soft data alone. They will be answered in the places we build for people, and those places will be better when both kinds of knowledge are routinely on the same planner's desk.

This is also, practically, what the language of human-centered design is asking for: a working way to keep residents' knowledge of place inside the process that produces the place. PPGIS, twenty years in, is one of the most concrete answers we have.

The first twenty years of PPGIS answered whether residents' lived experience could be gathered as real geographic data. The next twenty are about how it shapes the places we make.