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City Change – Effects of Urban Interventions

New construction may have important intended and unintended implications for its immediate vicinity as well as its larger urban context. This project intends to investigate and evaluate the impacts of specific development projects to create a deeper, more refined, and more thorough understanding of what kinds of contextual effects projects have, and pilot a monitoring system to detect these changes

We plan to study this impact as it spreads through time and space, measuring how various urban features change in the context of specific interventions. We measure the impact on property prices, opening and closing of business, ground floor activity, demographic changes, physical transformation of the urban environment, and other metrics to measure the impact of public interventions on street life. While the metrics focus on economic and physical effects, the project considers and evaluates changes critically; changes can have both positive and negative effects for the city and for its inhabitants, and how they are experienced can differ between groups and individuals. To ensure a nuanced result, we will engage with both large and small projects geographically spread over Stockholm. These results will support the City of Stockholm to evaluate measures and targets in the planning practice and to predict the impact of future urban interventions.

Maps of Stockholm with fields in shades of blue
Image: Tom Benson, MIT

Project Period

2021-2022