PS2 — Letting Bitola’s Citizens Redesign Their Own City, Virtually First
A 29-country Creative Europe art project in which GAUSS Institute built a navigable 3D model of Bitola layered with history, then opened it to crowd-sourced redesign — turning citizen ideas for the city’s derelict corners into a live online debate, and one of them into a real, rebuilt public space.
Creative Europe Culture Sub-Programme · Cooperation Projects, Guidelines EAC/S16/2013 · Sub-project “4D — Virtual Urban Art”
Project at a Glance
The nine partner institutions behind PS2’s eleven sub-projects, each exploring participatory art and urban culture in its own city
Objective & Summary
Across Europe, PS2’s premise was the same: urban development usually happens to citizens, not with them, decided by professionals working with abstract plans that ordinary residents never see and couldn’t easily respond to even if they did. Eleven sub-projects, from Bremen to Zagreb, each tested a different artistic method for closing that gap. Bitola’s version — built by GAUSS Institute with the NI Institute and Museum – Bitola — attacked it through time and geography at once.
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The idea was simple to state and hard to build: a precise 3D model of Bitola, geo-referenced object by object with type, historical background and legal status, that citizens could explore not just spatially but across time — seeing how a place looked and functioned in past decades — before suggesting what it should become.
How an idea moved from a citizen’s screen to a rebuilt corner of Bitola
Role & Activities of the GAUSS Institute
- Built the 3D model of Bitola, geo-referencing every included object with its type, historical background and applicable planning regulations, in collaboration with participating artists and architects.
- Developed the web-access software platform (urbandialog.net) implementing “Art Crowd Sourcing” — letting people of any background suggest and upload redesign ideas for pre-selected “Hot Spot” areas of the city, fully integrated with social media for discussion and voting.
- Added the time dimension (“3D + time = 4D”), letting users call up historical data on chosen objects and areas — a “time travel” feature meant to ground future proposals in a place’s real past rather than a blank slate.
- Ran a promotional, on-site phase using portable input points equipped with WACOM pen tablets, so citizens without web access or digital confidence could sketch and submit ideas directly in the areas concerned.
- Organised participatory workshops with artists and architects in the sub-project’s first phase, before opening the process to the general public.
- Ran public engagement activities including bilateral meetings with authorities and the local artists’ society, roughly 50 stakeholder meetings, two public opinion polls, and a public political debate with local decision-makers.
- Delivered the sub-project’s closing exhibition of virtual and real objects at the NI Institute and Museum – Bitola, and reported the project’s results to the European Commission with no deviations from the Grant Agreement.
Outputs (Deliverables)
- A geo-referenced 3D model of selected Bitola city areas, layered with historical and regulatory data for individual objects.
- The urbandialog.net web platform, combining the 3D/4D model with a citizen-facing crowd-sourcing and social-media-integrated discussion tool.
- Portable on-site input stations for direct citizen participation without needing personal internet access.
- An exhibition of virtual and real objects at the NI Institute and Museum – Bitola, closing the sub-project.
- One physically reconstructed public space, rebuilt on the basis of ideas generated through the PS2 process.
Outcomes
GAUSS’s own final report to the European Commission is unambiguous about what this added up to: for the first time, ordinary residents of Bitola — with no architecture or planning background required — had a direct, structured channel into decisions about their own city, and it worked. A simple written suggestion or a publicly aired idea, the report notes, was sometimes enough to drive a real change. The consortium’s coordinator rated the partnership “Excellent,” no deviations from the Grant Agreement were recorded, and partners went on to develop new joint proposals together after PS2 formally closed.
Significance
Participatory urban planning tools usually stop at collecting opinions; few close the loop all the way to a rebuilt space on the ground. Bitola’s sub-project did, and it did so by taking tacit, hard-to-capture local knowledge — what a place used to be, what it means to the people who pass it daily — and giving it the same digital weight as an architect’s formal plan. That the platform reached citizens with no technical background at all, through pen-tablet input stations as well as a website, mattered as much as the technology itself.
For the GAUSS Institute, PS2 is where its 3D city-modelling and geo-referencing capability was first built at scale — the same underlying skillset it would apply again, more visibly, in the CineCulture project’s 3D reconstruction of Bitola’s Old Theatre and Bazaar buildings. It also placed GAUSS inside one of the largest, most geographically diverse consortiums in its whole portfolio, with active partners from Bremen to Zagreb to Helsinki.
This project was funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe Programme, Culture Sub-Programme. The content of this page reflects the work of GAUSS Institute and does not necessarily represent the official position of the European Commission or the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA).