ReCenter Narva — Youth Vision for Narva 2035

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.