Streetmix is an in­ter­ac­tive tool that al­lows peo­ple to cre­ate their own street de­signs, and share them with each other and with their city plan­ners.

This pro­ject arose from my pro­fes­sional ex­pe­ri­ence as an ur­ban plan­ner, rec­og­niz­ing that, while civic en­gage­ment is nec­es­sary to cre­ate func­tional, eq­ui­table pub­lic spaces, the process it­self is bro­ken. The feed­back loop be­tween plan­ners and the com­mu­nity is too slow, with lit­tle in­cen­tive for most would-be stake­hold­ers, while at­tract­ing only a dis­pro­por­tion­ate mi­nor­ity of very loud spe­cial in­ter­ests.

By learn­ing from other dis­ci­plines, like gam­ing, graphic de­sign, cul­tural an­thro­pol­ogy, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, aand cut­ting-edge soft­ware de­vel­op­ment, Streetmix be­gan as an ex­per­i­ment to see how the civic en­gage­ment process can be trans­formed.

In ad­di­tion, by part­ner­ing strate­gi­cally with plan­ners, ad­vo­cacy groups, and busi­ness im­prove­ment dis­tricts, Streetmix has also changed how the plan­ning in­dus­try ap­proaches soft­ware pro­cure­ment, and a model for man­ag­ing a cross-dis­ci­pli­nary open source com­mu­nity.