Client: City of Warsaw, Department of Architecture and Spatial Planning (BAiPP)
Location: Warsaw, Poland
Year: 2019
Sector: Scenario Planning · Social Media Data · International Advisory
As Warsaw rewrote its citywide spatial strategy, SPIN Unit joined an international expert workshop to show how mapped social-media activity data could ground scenario planning in evidence rather than intuition.
Warsaw was updating its “Studium” — the city’s core spatial development strategy — for the first time since 2006, aiming to curb sprawl and build a more compact, multi-functional city. The planning department invited international experts to help move the process from scenario presentation to genuinely scenario-based planning.
Commissioned as part of a formal, staged workshop process following a May 2018 City Council resolution to prepare a new Studium. SPIN Unit (Damiano Cerrone) was invited alongside partner firm 1=2 Urban Design (Jacob Dibble) for a two-day workshop in January 2019, alongside city officials and other international urbanists.
Applied SPIN Unit’s Space/Activities/Values framework to roughly 48,000 Foursquare points of interest across Warsaw, classified into Necessary and Optional activity categories and mapped at both city-wide and street level, to reveal patterns invisible in the city’s existing (extensive but siloed) data.
Delivered as a post-workshop advisory report combining reflections on the two-day session with SPIN Unit’s independent activity analysis.
- Activity in Warsaw stretches in long linear strips along arterial roads rather than clustering in central blocks — a markedly different pattern from cities like Helsinki or Turku.
- This linear distribution weakens individual neighbourhoods’ identity, since activity bypasses local centres in favour of continuous road-front strips.
- Urban block interiors are largely empty of activity across both the centre and periphery — flagged as a genuine, under-exploited opportunity for infill.
- Public open space is a real strength: three of the five most-visited place types in Warsaw are outdoor spaces, plazas, or parks — unusually strong compared to peer European cities.
- Warsaw’s planning office holds an unusually rich set of data layers, but SPIN Unit’s core recommendation was that these remain siloed and need to be synthesised into a single KPI-driven framework to actually support scenario planning.
Contributed directly to Warsaw’s process of building its new citywide spatial strategy, and demonstrated SPIN Unit’s methodology to an international audience of planners and consultants convened by the city.