Experimentation Evaluation Toolkit — Ylä-Malmi Pilot
Cities run placemaking experiments constantly but rarely measure whether they work — this project built a reusable toolkit for choosing the right metrics, then tested it on a real square in Helsinki.
Living-lab and placemaking experiments are cheap to run and hard to evaluate well — practitioners are often left guessing which of dozens of possible metrics actually matter for a given intervention. Forum Virium wanted a general-purpose framework for making that choice, validated against a real case.
Commissioned via tender, delivered as a subcontract under agency Miltton, with support from the Nordic Smart City Network, Nordic Innovation, and Helsinki Innovation Districts. Piloted on Ylä-Malmi square, where the city had installed modular street furniture with wildflower planters (tended by a local kindergarten) between April and August 2022.
Built a library of roughly 100 candidate urban metrics grounded in academic literature, narrowed to 48 relevant ones and then 20 fully documented “toolkit cards,” organised across three dimensions — Space, Activity, Culture — each assessed through physical, digital, and hybrid data sources. Fifteen of the twenty metrics were actually tested at Ylä-Malmi, combining space-syntax network analysis, camera-based footfall and dwell-time sensing, Foursquare visit data, and digital ethnography of geotagged Instagram photos.
Delivered as an 80-page toolkit with full methodology cards, plus a public talk presenting the approach.
Experimentation Evaluation Toolkit
Talk – Measuring public space with cultural analytics
