Mapping What Matters
City Layers is a map-based community engagement platform that helps organisations involve communities in urban design, planning, and decisions about places.
City Layers makes public participation in urban design, planning and decisions easy and meaningful.
Using participatory mapping, cities and organisations engage communities to share their experiences, responses, needs and ideas directly on a digital map. From there, City Layers does the rest: every response is organised into clear patterns as it arrives, then turned into actionable evidence.
All in one platform, from the first comment to the final decision.
Contact UsEasily engage participats to pin observations, needs, barriers, and ideas directly onto a digital map. Every contribution stays linked to the place it describes, spatially visible and ready to analyse.
See it in actionReveal spatial insights by identifying hotspots, recurring themes, and priority areas. Understand how communities experience specific places, and decision support by frequency and relevance.
Read the methodologyTurn mapped insights into dashboards, reports, and priorities your team can act on. Use community knowledge to improve design, planning, communication, and location-specific decisions.
Explore our servicesEverything you need to know about how City Layers works.
Participatory mapping is a method that lets residents pin their observations, feelings, and ideas directly onto a digital map. Every contribution stays anchored to the exact place it describes, turning lived experience into spatial data that planners can analyse.
A digital platform for community engagement lets people share their experiences, needs, and ideas about a place online, instead of only through in-person meetings or paper surveys. City Layers does this through a live, map-based interface: contributions are tied to specific locations, and organisations get a dashboard showing where needs, ideas, and concerns are concentrated, making participation easier to run and easier to act on.
We work with municipalities and public sector teams, mobility planners and transport operators, urban designers and real estate developers, community and civic organisations, and universities and research institutions — anyone who needs to understand how a place is actually experienced by the people who use it.
Both. Platform Access lets your team run participation independently with our software. A Service Campaign means we design and facilitate the entire process — planning, workshops, mapping walks and reporting.
Most citizen mapping tools collect input, but stop there. City Layers combines mapping with AI-supported analysis, so individual observations become structured, prioritised evidence, not just a long list of comments. Our methodology was also co-developed with the people who use it — residents, accessibility specialists, planners, and researchers, which means the process holds up in real projects, not just in theory.
Look for input that's tied to a specific location rather than a generic comment box, the ability to analyse and prioritise responses rather than just collect them, and a provider who supports the full process, from setup through to a final report you can act on. A platform that's only easy to launch but hard to make sense of afterwards usually creates more work, not less.
Yes, accessibility is built into how our methodology works, not added on afterwards. Our campaigns include physical worksheets and guided facilitation so participation doesn't require a smartphone, a strong internet connection, or any prior experience. Multilingual support is something we're actively expanding as part of our ongoing product development.
No. Through our co-development process, we found that requiring people to download and install a dedicated app is a real barrier to participation. Instead, we use web-based tools, so anyone can access the interface through a browser on whatever device they already have — phone, tablet, or computer.
Structured spatial data, geolocated observations, sentiment patterns, and prioritised themes, alongside reports and visualisations that are ready for stakeholders and planning documents.
Join the cities, planners and communities using City Layers to make better decisions about real places.