A participatory urban intelligence platform that transforms subjective citizen experience into structured, actionable spatial data.

City Layers is a research-driven digital platform that repositions mapping as an active civic practice. Developed within the framework of the TU Wien–led, Austrian Science Fund (FWF)–funded project, the platform enables citizens to document, interpret, and shape urban environments through their lived experience.

The project challenges dominant urban data paradigms, which tend to privilege quantifiable, simulated, and top-down datasets. Instead, City Layers introduces a system for capturing subjective, embodied, and often overlooked dimensions of the city—ranging from perception, comfort, and safety to atmosphere, accessibility, and identity. These dimensions are not treated as anecdotal, but as structured inputs into a collective spatial intelligence.

At its core, the platform operates as a layered interface between citizens and the city. Users interact through a web-based application that combines mapping tools, qualitative inputs (text, tags, images), and quantitative sliders to record observations in situ. Each contribution becomes part of a shared, evolving urban dataset—an open commons of spatial knowledge.

To sustain engagement and scale participation, the platform incorporates a gamified system: users build profiles, accumulate points, unlock badges, and participate in a leaderboard structure. This transforms participation from passive feedback into an ongoing, incentivized civic activity—where mapping becomes both a personal and collective act of city-making.

The methodological backbone of City Layers is deeply interdisciplinary. Developed in collaboration with architects, urbanists, social scientists, equity specialists, and wayfinding experts, the platform embeds carefully designed questions and interaction protocols. These are not neutral—they are constructed to reveal hidden spatial inequalities, surface diverse perspectives, and generate meaningful, comparable data across contexts.

Through this process, individual observations are reorganized into collective knowledge. The resulting dataset enables new forms of dialogue between citizens, designers, and institutions—supporting more inclusive, responsive, and adaptive urban strategies.

City Layers ultimately positions the city not as a fixed object to be analyzed, but as a continuously negotiated field of experiences—where citizens are not users, but co-authors.

City Layers is part of Spatial Forces’ broader agenda to develop new instruments for spatial intelligence.

At Spatial Forces, we operate across scales, from the micro (biosensing, perception, interaction) to the territorial (urban systems, governance, and infrastructure). City Layers extends this approach into the civic domain, building a platform where subjective experience becomes measurable, comparable, and operational within urban design processes.

Rather than treating data as something extracted, City Layers constructs a participatory system where data is produced, curated, and activated collectively. The platform acts as an interface between lived experience and spatial decision-making, bridging citizens, researchers, and institutions.