What if city planning started with the people who live there?
DesireLines is a community-engaged mapping project that reimagines how cities listen to their residents—especially young people whose voices are often missing from urban planning decisions. Instead of traditional town halls and surveys, we embedded ourselves in everyday community life, training high school students as co-researchers to map their own neighborhoods through walk-along interviews and digital storytelling.
Working with local youth as Community Research Assistants, we explored how residents actually move through, experience, and envision their neighborhoods. Using mobile mapping tools, participants documented everything from infrastructure challenges to points of pride, creating community-authored maps that reveal spatial realities often invisible to traditional planning processes.
The project takes its name from “desire lines”—the informal paths people create when official routes don’t serve their needs. Our community desire lines go beyond physical pathways to represent the spatial narratives, experiences, and possibilities that emerge when residents have the tools to map their world on their own terms.
Grounded in design justice, feminist GIS, and participatory research, DesireLines demonstrates how meaningful community engagement can happen when we shift from consultation to collaboration—and when we recognize that those who live in a place are the true experts on what it needs.
This work was developed by researchers at the University of Waterloo in partnership with local community organizations and youth, as part of ongoing efforts to democratize spatial planning and center equity-deserving communities in urban decision-making.
Our team
