The ASU-SFI-SDI collaboration is developing its reblocking platform as an open-source tool that will allow residents to re-plan their communities with minimal cost and disturbance. The platform allows users to map buildings, thoroughfares and services within their community and propose new layouts that most efficiently solve the problem of universal access.

“Creating visual digital images for a dialogue within the city and between communities is not a process presently in place,” said SDI chair Sheela Patel. “Enabling slum communities to generate these data, getting internal agreements within their members and presenting it to cities is of great value to the Slum Dwellers International affiliates.”

Users will be able to iterate and edit suggestions to coordinate community and local government objectives. Quantities such as street length and proximity to existing services provide real-time estimates for how much each street plan will cost. The website, OpenReblock.org (pictured below), includes a beta version of the urban planning tools that the project will now improve through better design and collaboration between slum communities, local governments, researchers and technologists.

“By providing a map that can be iterated to create a well-serviced neighborhood, we ensure that everyone involved is working from a common reference,” said Christa Brelsford, an ASU-SFI postdoctoral fellow who designed the Open Reblock algorithms and is helping develop the platform. She received a PhD from ASU's School of Sustainability.

With new support from the Global Resilience Partnership as part of the challenge, the project will create a more dynamic and user-centric design that will enable slum communities to easily generate, analyze and edit maps for providing access to each place of work and residence, and in this way set neighborhoods on a path of resilient development, as dictated by local knowledge and needs.

“The science and the algorithms behind Open Reblock allow you to create potential solutions faster and more systematically,” SFI’s Bettencourt said, “which we hope will speed up the process of converging on a great design that will more surely improve the lives of people in the neighborhood — according to their own preferences — and their city. It also provides a new perspective on the street plans of neighborhoods in all cities.”

The Amplify Urban Resilience Challenge will provide funding and design support for innovative solutions. The proposal from the ASU-SFI-SDI collaboration will receive support from the Global Resilience Partnership — which includes the Rockefeller Foundation, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and the U.S. Agency for International Development. 

The Urban Resilience Challenge is one of 10 innovation challenges under the Amplify Program that “find and support solutions to some of the world’s most pressing development issues.” The challenges are a collaboration between the international design group IDEO.org, OpenIDEO, and the Department for International Development.