Streetmix
Drag-and-drop cross-sections of your street — sidewalks, bike lanes, trees, parking — so a block can show the city what it wants instead of describing it. Born at a Code for America hackathon.
Streetmix began at a January 2013 Code for America hackathon, inspired by something Lou Huang saw at a San Francisco community meeting: planners handing residents paper cutouts of street elements to arrange. The web version does exactly that — drag sidewalks, bike lanes, transit, trees, and parking into a street cross-section, sized to your street's real width, and share the picture.
It's been used both by governments (San Francisco's Public Works gathered feedback on the Second Street redesign with it) and against them (Sioux Center, Iowa residents mocked up alternatives to a highway widening; Wellington cycleway advocates drew the bike lanes the council hadn't). AGPL-3.0, free at streetmix.net, maintained by a small collective.
What it teaches: giving neighbors a *drawing tool* changes the power dynamics of a planning meeting — the block arrives with twelve pictures of the same wish instead of three minutes of public comment.
Neighborhood remix: before the traffic-calming petition, every household mocks up 'our street, fixed' and the gallery goes to the city as one visual voice.
Details
- maker: Streetmix LLC / Bad Idea Factory collective
- hosted: free at streetmix.net
- license: AGPL-3.0
- ctfg url: https://civictech.guide/listing/streetmix
- repo url: https://github.com/streetmix/streetmix
- remix idea: Every household draws 'our street, fixed' before the petition goes in.
- practice kind: tool
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Build prompt
Build: A Front-Porch Digest for One Block
A starter build: fork Front Porch Forum's constitution, not its code — real names, one geography, one email a day, a rotating…
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Build prompt
Build: A Living Asset Map
A starter build bridging both new shelves: an asset-based community development map where the assets are neighbors' own declared gifts,…
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Build prompt
Build: A Third-Places Map for Your Neighborhood
A starter build: a local Ushahidi — neighbors collectively map the porches, stoops, cafés, courts, and corners where the neighborhood…
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Build prompt
Build: Adopt-a-Thing for Your Block
A starter build: the Adopt-a-Hydrant pattern, remixed — a map of small civic objects (tree wells, storm drains, benches, little libraries)…
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Build prompt
Build: Participatory Budgeting for a Very Small Budget
A starter build: run real participatory budgeting on a block association's actual money — propose, develop, vote, do — sized so the whole…
Contributed by Streetmix (Lou Huang & collaborators; Code for America lineage) · streetmix.net
Original source: https://streetmix.net/
See something to fix or add? Suggest an edit on GitHub — the commons lives in git too, and its history is the changelog.
local-civic-techcivic-tech-toolstreetsplanningopen-source