Engaging Citizens with Urban Planning Using City Blocks, a Mixed Reality Design and Visualisation Platform

This paper looks at city scale visualisation during concept generation as a method to engage citizens with city planning. A Virtual Reality based platform is proposed, prototyped and piloted. The platform, City Blocks, utilises an abstracted physical design kit and a generated, explorable digital twin to visualise and analyse concepts. It is found that through the Virtual Reality based platform, later design stage visualisation of ideas can be brought to concept development and that citizens are able to reason and refine designs via an abstracted physical twin. The paper presents an analysis of the 149 city designs, including a comparison between citizens and experienced urban planners.