From Fresk to Maptivity

A couple of years ago I wrote about the Placemaking Fresk, a card-based workshop to explore urban sustainability, built on the ISO 37101 framework. People liked it. But we kept hearing the same thing at the end of sessions: great, now what?

Maptivity is the answer to that question. Same spirit, same framework, but with a very different goal: less “understand how a sustainable city works”, more “look at what’s already happening in your neighbourhood, see what’s missing, and leave the room with something to do”.

How it works

It’s a 90-minute workshop. Small groups, a game board, a deck of cards, and no experts needed.

• Quick Build (10 min): get familiar with the board, which maps city services against sustainability purposes (resilience, social cohesion, resource efficiency…).
• Reality Check (20 min): place the real projects of your neighbourhood on it. Transport, housing, green spaces, youth services, all of it.
• Fill the Gaps (20 min): the empty spots on the board are where the conversation gets interesting. Add the ideas that are missing.
• Get Real (10 min): sort them by impact and feasibility.
• Make it Happen (15 min): commit to actions. Actual next steps, with names next to them.

The board does a lot of the work: it’s visual, tangible, and it gives quieter voices as much room as the loudest ones in the room. Which, if you’ve run a few public meetings, you know is rarer than it should be.

Example cities

To make it easy to try without a real neighbourhood at hand, the site comes with example portfolios for nine fictional cities. Yes, you can run a sustainability workshop on Gotham, Wakanda or the Shire =) Each comes with its own numbered activity pages and hypothetical projects, which makes for great warm-ups (and surprisingly serious debates about hobbit public transport).

The paper, and the data

This came out of the PROBONO project (PBN, EU-funded under Horizon 2020, grant 101037075). In 2026 we wrote it up properly: the article was reworked, reviewed, revised, and is now accepted and published in Sustainability (MDPI): doi:10.3390/su18157746.

We also released the open dataset behind the website, so the cards, cities and activities can be reused and remixed (under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, like the site).

So…

It lives on maptivity.online. If you run it in your own neighbourhood, I’d love to hear what ended up on the empty squares.