Client: City of Narva
Location: Narva, Estonia
Year: 2020
Sector: Participatory Planning · Youth Engagement · Co-Design
Narva’s new masterplan needed to reflect what its young people actually want — so instead of a conventional survey, this project turned mental-mapping and city-visioning into a 30-minute game young people would actually finish.
The new Narva masterplan focuses on rethinking urban design to be increasingly attractive and liveable for young people. A significant step in that strategy was building a mental map of the city as seen through young eyes, and then giving them real agency to reimagine it — but young people are notoriously elusive to traditional surveys and rarely enjoy participatory processes.
Delivered for the City of Narva in partnership with Linnalabor, an Estonian participatory-urbanism organisation, as direct input to the Narva 2035+ masterplan, which itself is built around adapting the city to a shrinking population. The survey was explicitly designed to be comparable against a similar youth study done in Narva roughly a decade earlier.
Used Maptionnaire (the Aalto University planning-survey tool also used by Stockholm, New York, and Helsinki) to keep the mapping exercise to 30 minutes, run across six facilitated workshops in three general schools, the Ida-Viru vocational centre, and Narva College, plus an open online survey reaching youth organisations citywide — 305 respondents in total, 60% under 30. A second exercise used a custom deck of illustrated cards — urban design solutions, mobility modes, activities — that students picked from to build a collective vision of Narva in 2035, statistically analysed and turned into an artist’s-impression illustration.
Delivered as a technical GIS dataset for planners, and separately redesigned into an engaging public-facing poster and report — the team found the raw technical cartography “hardly readable” for a general audience and rebuilt it for clarity without sacrificing accuracy.
- 305 respondents, 60% under 30 — reached through a mix of controlled in-school workshops and an open online survey, giving both a rigorous core sample and broader city-wide reach.
- The river promenade, old town, and city centre are consistently the most-liked places, while specific sites — a stadium/ice hall complex, a disused club building — were repeatedly flagged as neglected despite real potential.
- 75–100% of surveyed youth walk almost everywhere in Narva; public transport use is under 20%, and car use only starts rising from the 30+ age bracket — a strong evidence base for a pedestrian- and bike-first masterplan.
- Youth’s own top requests from the co-design exercise: connected green corridors, better lighting, upgraded school surroundings, more activity outside shopping malls, and contemporary architecture and street art.
- The survey was explicitly designed for longitudinal comparison against a ~2010 Narva youth study — letting planners see two decades of change in what young people actually value.
The resulting youth vision became a strategic document helping planners and designers align the Narva 2035+ masterplan with what the city’s young residents actually want — a rare case of genuinely operationalising youth input in a formal planning process, later extended to a parallel study of local entrepreneurs.