A more walkable Liverpool
The Smart Liverpool, Smart pedestrians project, winner of the 2018 local government initiative award, focuses on improving the livability and walkability in the city of Liverpool, Australia. This project is a collaboration between arki_lab and the SMART Infrastructure Facility at the University of Wollongong. The project seeks to improve the walkability in the city by monitoring mobility patterns within Liverpool CBD using complimentary sensing technologies.

Gamification as an ice-breaker 
Employing gamification methods, arki_lab has conducted a series of workshops with multiple stakeholders ranging from high school students to traffic managers in the city of Liverpool. The gamification method helped gathering the different stakeholders around the same table and facilitated a discussion amongst them.

The users know best 
During the workshop, the participants discussed how they moved around in the city, identified traffic congestion, places where they felt unsafe during evenings, lack of diversified activities and many more topics. The majority of the participants expressed their wish for a more walkable Liverpool, with more possibilities for pause and leisure. They also expressed a wish to integrate the upcoming university campus with the city, instead of fencing it off. With these objectives in mind they suggested key locations where smart sensors should be deployed to inform an evidence-based urban transformation. arki_lab has analysed the outcome of these workshops in a report, which is delivered to the Liverpool City Council and is informing the next steps of the project.