We believe that residents are experts of their neighborhoods. Their everyday experiences constitute an essential knowledge for architecture, planning, urban development, mobility and policy-making. We are committed to information sharing and public participation. Bringing together local and global knowledge, we produce innovative models in architecture, planning and policy making that take as the starting point the user, the resident and the locality. At the same time urbz draws on a rich network of global practitioners encouraging a wide ranging set of innovative responses that complement the role of the local resident - who remains the most knowledgeable expert in that context. In this way the rootedness and mobility of the different participants in each intervention of urbz projects, works as a methodology that helps us understand the dynamics of each context and locality on its own terms.
The work of urbz has strived to emphasize the importance of people centred design, the value of co-creation at the neighbourhood level, the signi cance of civic participation in planning processes and the idea that a range of different skills are part of the urban processes beyond architecture and planning – this includes social anthropology, engineering, studies of local economies, mobility and creative practices.
We have developed a methodology around immersive participation that makes its team a part of the local context. In our participatory workshops and ethnographic studies we map and document; social and cultural landscapes and habitats, community/stakeholders knowledge of their contexts, and traditional practices that are already being used locally. We also use visualisations as tools in participatory planning. Typically, stake-holder discussions, site-based workshops, qualitative interviews, eld visits, and neighbourhood walks constitute the participatory component of our mapping-intervention initiatives. These are complemented by quantitative studies based on peer- based surveys and networked co-research practices.
Over the last decade urbz has organized participatory workshops at the scale of localities and neighbourhoods mandated by public, private and community based organisations in cities such as Delhi, Kochi, Tokyo, Istanbul, Chandigarh, Goa, Lausanne and Seoul besides the cities where its main offices are located - Mumbai and Geneva.