Context and rules
Introduction: Understanding the Placemaking Maptivity
The Placemaking Maptivity is a workshop tool designed to change how communities approach sustainable urban development. At its core it is a serious game: a collaborative space where diverse stakeholders—city officials, urban planners, community organisations, and citizens—can visualise, discuss, and align their efforts toward more sustainable, resilient neighbourhoods.
You do this by placing cards on a large shared map. Each card represents a real project, service, or goal, and where you place it shows how it contributes to the city’s sustainability. By the end of a session, the map reveals at a glance where a community is thriving, where the gaps are, and which new ideas are worth pursuing.
Breaking down silos, building shared vision
One of the biggest obstacles to urban sustainability is fragmentation. Transport departments plan mobility, housing authorities develop residential strategy, and environmental teams run green initiatives—often with little coordination. The Maptivity gives all of these participants a common language and a single visual frame, so each can see how their own work connects to the bigger picture and to everyone else’s.
From abstract frameworks to tangible action
The workshop translates the internationally recognised ISO 37101 framework for sustainable communities into something you can touch and move. Instead of debating abstract concepts, participants handle physical or digital cards and place them on a board that crosses sustainability purposes (such as resilience, social cohesion, and responsible resource use) with action areas (such as mobility, governance, and education). Placing a single card often lights up several goals at once—which is exactly the point.
What the board looks like
The Maptivity board is a grid with two axes:
- The yellow axis — sustainability purposes. Why an initiative matters: the broad outcomes a community is working toward (for example resilience, attractiveness, social cohesion, well-being, environmental quality, and responsible resource use). These come from the ISO 37101 purposes.
- The purple axis — action areas. Where it happens: the practical domains of city life (mobility, housing, education, governance, energy, green space, and so on).
Every cell in the grid is an intersection of a purpose and an action area. When you place a card in a cell, you are making a claim: this initiative serves this purpose through this action area. Because most real projects serve several purposes, a single project often ends up represented in more than one cell—and seeing that spread is one of the workshop’s “aha” moments.
A simplified board looks like this (real sessions use more rows and columns):
| Mobility | Housing | Education | Energy | Green space | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Resilience | · | · | · | · | · |
| Social cohesion | · | · | · | · | · |
| Resource efficiency | · | · | · | · | · |
| Well-being | · | · | · | · | · |
Rows (yellow) are the purposes; columns (purple) are the action areas. A community garden, for instance, might sit at Social cohesion × Green space and Well-being × Green space and Education × Green space all at once.
The cards
A session uses two kinds of cards:
- Term cards label the grid itself—the purposes and action areas—so the group builds and agrees on the board before using it.
- Project cards represent real initiatives happening in the area (bike lanes, community gardens, youth programmes, retrofit schemes, and the like), which participants then place onto the board.
A note on vision cards. The full Maptivity method also includes vision cards for longer-term strategic statements. The 90-minute sprint format described here deliberately leaves them out to protect the pace—term and project cards only. Longer sessions can add them back in.
How a session flows
A standard session runs 90 minutes and moves quickly through six stages:
- Warm-up — introductions and a quick tour of the tools.
- Build the board — lay out the term cards and agree on the grid.
- Map reality — place project cards to show what already exists.
- Fill the gaps — brainstorm new ideas for the empty spaces.
- Reality check — sort the best ideas by impact and feasibility.
- Close-out — capture insights, name champions, agree next steps.
The detailed walk-throughs live on two companion pages:
- For participants — what to expect and how to get the most out of the session.
- For facilitators — a minute-by-minute guide to running it.
What you’ll need
In person: a large printed map, term and project cards, plenty of sticky notes and markers, and table space for groups of four to six.
Online: a Miro board (or equivalent shared whiteboard) with the map and cards pre-loaded, and a device per participant. Joining a few minutes early for a tech check is worth it.
No prior expertise is required. If you live, work, study, or spend time in the place you’re mapping, you already hold the knowledge the workshop needs.
Fostering genuine collaboration
Through guided activities and structured dialogue, the Maptivity creates a setting where technical experts and residents can actually understand each other, where long-term vision connects to immediate action, and where gaps in current effort become visible and addressable. Whether run around a physical board or through online tools, the format rewards active participation, creative problem-solving, and shared ownership of both the challenges and the solutions.
It doesn’t just help people understand sustainability—it helps them spot synergies, surface gaps, and build practical strategies that draw on the full value of cross-sector collaboration.