Cuidad Dulce -- Le Monde Innovation - Citizen Engagement — File 206666


 The Pedestrian Project Urban planning informed by lived experience  Photo: Native bee on a coffee cup, Costa Rica. By: Edgar Mora CURRIDABAT INNOVATION LAB O p t i m i z i n g M u n i c i p a l i t y S e r v i c e s The Citizen Engagement Award Municipalidad de Curridabat Via Street 093, 215, 11801 Costa Rica | Tel: +506 2216 5200 http://innovacion.curridabat.go.cr

Background The State of Civic Engagement The country of Costa Rica enjoys a strong democratic system with high level of civility. The country has no army and none of its political parties have occupied office for more that two consecutive terms. However, several studies have shown that the country’s civic engagement ranks among the lowest in the world. According to the Supreme Court of Costa Rican Elections, the country’s voter turnout in 2016 was as low as 35%. And in 2013, the UN’s National Human Development Report rated Costa Rica’s citizen engagement at 41%, lowest in the world. The UN report explains that although the Costa Rican population wants to “live a life of kindness”, it lacks the desire to get involved in long-term commitments. Reasons and excuses include: 1) lack of time, 44.1% 2) lack of information 20.3%, 3) lack of access to civic organizations 8.5% and 4) plan to participate in the future 9.1%. The City We Want to Live In In collaboration with domestic and international urban centers, academic institutions, the public and the private sectors, the City of Curridabat assigned its Innovation Lab to put together a vision for “the city we want to live in”, it is called Sweet City. Sweet City (Cuidad Dulce) is a UN- Habitat award winner for most inspiring urban practices of the New Urban Agenda. It is a holistic urban development model that pays explicit and implicit attention to all members of the community, including nature. The model is based on five dimensions: co- existence, infrastructure, biodiversity, habitat and productivity. At the center of its urban planning, it places not just the taxpayer and the automobile driver, it includes the trees, the plants and their pollinators, natives bees, butterflies and human birds. It includes the the rivers, pedestrian, the teenage girl Figure 1: Sweet City Model based the five dimensions of Co-existence, Habitat, Productivity infrastructure and biodiversity, where all living things area at the core.

walking home from school, the senior citizen and the wheelchair users. Its design aims to accomplish the following: • Abolish the antagonism between nature and the urban space to reach true co-existence • Aligns urban infrastructure and landscape architecture with biodiversity • Include vulnerable populations and enable them to influence policy for a more equal and productive habitat • Turns the city from an extractive consuming power into a productive one • Adapts the city to climate change while reducing its ecological footprint How Many People Did We Make Happy Today? At the core of our responsibility to the citizen, each day we ask ourselves the question: how many people did we make happy today? Based on this premise, we decided to migrate from the traditional urban planning and governance models and focus instead on the experience of the citizen. We want to bridge the divide great between government and people. To do that, we recognized that we must somehow map the experience of our community from their perspective. To try and improve the quality of the daily life of our community through their feedback to us. To visualize that life and empathize with it, we started building what we call the Atlas of the Real Experience of the Citizen (ARCE). The ARCE is based on the moral foundations of the community. It is aligned with the experience of the citizens, encompassing the culture, ideology and behavior that is often buried underneath a standard political structure. The Atlas is a dynamic and living document that reflects what a city feels like and what characteristics makes up its identify. Clearly, no two cities’ Atlas will cary the same components, because the approach is to mapping is based on how we feel rather than what is brother us. For example, a map of “happiness” would give us information about how how our community feels about pollution, green pathways, noise, or urban ascetics. Similarly, a map of “fairness” will tell us about inequality, housing or education. Depending on the strength and weaknesses of each city, different weights and priorities will be put on how a Municipality decides to provide its services. The Ability to “Vote” Every Day To build the Atlas, we must enable every member of our community to participate in providing their perspective on how the city is doing. At the same time, we want to make sure we keep the Sweet City model promise, where we put special attention on the marginalized populations, human and nature. So, beyond reporting on street incidents, such as potholes or garbage collection, we wanted a tool that the municipality to gather data from all population segments and give each citizen a sense of ownership of their own city. As mentioned earlier, civic engagement in Costa Rica is extremely low and it is often reduced to the act of voting once every 2-4 years. In the same token, building the Atlas relies heavily on

frequent civic participation by the community. Given the massive mobile device penetration in Costa Rica and Curridabat (over 82%), we concluded that the most effective way to access the perspective of our community is through a participatory and collaborative App. So we built iMayor. Beyond the daily reporting of urban incident such as potholes or garbage collection, iMayor gives the citizen the feeling that they are vote and tracking the progress of issues every day. It is designed to express content and discontent about the progress of municipal services. Counter to the common standard, it is designed to add pressure on the system to ensure the satisfaction of it people. Figure 2: All incidents recorded through iMayor are plotted into the Atlas, generating maps that begin to reflect the experience of the real citizen.

The Pedestrian Project The project is developed within the framework of the incorporation of citizen experience in the planning and execution of municipal projects. The project aims to study the mobility of the disabled and obtain, analyze and deploy information to guide municipal planning. All this in order to measure the impact that disabilities may have on the Labor participation and urban experience. Applying the Sweet City model, we opted for the traditionally marginalized segment of the populations i.e. the wheelchair user. We conducted a study to locate the population with disabilities, according to the 2011 census, and then select a sample of case studies, which analyzed, through a technological mechanism, Arduino device, the description of the actual mobility experience faced by people with disabilities in the Canton of Curridabat. This report corresponds to the tests performed with the Arduino device, before moving on to the data collection stage in the field with the study of 7 people with disabilities in the Canton of Curridabat. What we did is measure the real mobility of citizens in wheelchair during their attempt to go to work. Report on tests performed with the Arduino device measuring Travel time, 2. Route traveled, 3. Distance traveled, 4. Effort performed, 5. Exposure to vibration, 6. Obstacles in the route, 7. Particles suspended in The air, 8. Changes of angle during the route, 9. Geolocation of places of interest (stops, Clinics, parks, schools, etc.), 


Method The results obtained, according to the established variables, show the following: Travel time: 42 minutes it takes the route from the starting point to the end of the trip. Distance traveled: 6 kilometers. • Partial displacement: They are not shown in the course since it was a single sustained trip. • Vibration: 1 km (changes in texture and irregularities in the ground). • Obstacles in the route: It corresponds mainly to holes in the track and sections of the track with ballast and not asphalt. • Additional effort: 1 km. (Vibration + obstacles). It corresponds to the total area of additional major effort, which would not be traveled without disability. • Geo-location of places of interest and stops: it is possible to show educational centers, bus stops, shopping centers. In the next report, ramps and danger points will also be displayed on a 1: 1000 scale for foot or wheelchair travel. Conclusions • 70% of the distance traveled presents an additional effort made by the same condition of disability, i.e. for a person without disability, these sections with obstacles and vibration, are not a problem, but for a person with a disability they mean an effort Additional 70% of the trip in distance, and an extension of travel time of 30%. This is clear if • Considers that to cover only 5.7 kilometers, took 34 minutes, this being in private transport. •  A similar trip in public transport would be assumed to double, given the waiting times for buses with ramps, as they make up only 10% of the bus fleet of the routes. Most importantly, we discovered that the air quality was at a much worst quality the walking pedestrian breaths, due to its proximity to the ground. 


Results So Far During the first phase, we piloted the app with 250 active users for twelve months, providing over 2,000 incidents on Curridabat’s map. The pilot focused on walkability incidents in the city and the quality of its sidewalks. The goal was to measure the interest of a Curridabat sample population in civic engagement and identify areas for improvement in the App itself. The process resulted in version iMayor 2.0 which is available here. What we did not expect is that the iMayor pilot have already shown a strong enough argument to the City Council that have already swayed the allocation of $1million of the annual budget (5%) towards sidewalk maintenance and development, instead of roads! In other words, the App achieved what we wanted it to achieve during the pilot phase. We have proven that we can overcome the civic engagement objections thereby increasing civic-engagement, draw data from the community, and use that data to help prioritize municipal activities. The Future As of January 2017, we have widened the user-base to about 600 active users (The pace of expansion is tied directly to the service resources made available to the city). It is now clear to us that the more participation we get, the more community buy-in we see. Case in point, over the past ten years, under the the Mayorship of Edgar Altamirano, we have seen the city’s annual budget increase from $2 Million to $20 Million. This dramatic increase draws from the collaborative urban policies that the team put in place. They are indicators that the community is willing to contribute more when they see results for the very requests they asked for. Video Link: 3 minutes Click here to watch he video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/ 0BxE4mEm2IM9RZ2hjYjBHczVvaW8/view?usp=sharing 
 569 active users as of February, 2017

The Team http://innovacion.curridabat.go.cr/equipo/ Edgar Mora Altamirano Mayor Patricio Morera Director de la Fundación Curridabat Irene García Brenes Asesora de la Alcaldía de Curridabat Gustavo Morales Ovares Especialista en comunicación Huber Méndez Hernández Gerente Territorial Mariana Solano Umanzor Asesora Aldo Protti Asesor Catalina Acuña Castillo Maestría en Diseño de Producción para cine y TV Daniel Navarro Quesada Lucía Artavia Guzmán Licenciatura en Arquitectura de la Universidad de Costa Rica Adrián Fernández Malavasi Esteban Alpízar Portuguez Desarrollador ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !