PRISMA – Process tool for social sustainability in urban transformatio

PRISMA is Swedish for prism, a transparent optical element which reflects light in different ways depending on how you turn it. Just like a prism, PRISMA has as its ambition to provide support for city development actors - such as municipalities, consultancies, citizens and housing companies - with understanding what social sustainability can be in relation to urban design. The tool has been developed with the help of case studies of actual city development processes as well as through research overviews on the relationship between urban design and various aspects of health, well-being and justice. PRISMA is meant to provide a flexible and research based tool that can be utilized in different situations and is meant to complement the local and professional knowledge of city development actors such as urban planners, housing developers, contractors, citizens and public health professionals. The tool has been developed and tested in closed in cooperation with a number of city development actors, first and foremost with the municipality of Mölndal in Western Sweden.

PRISMA consists of an interactive PDF-document which in a simple way presents overviews of research in relation to aspects of the built environment such as yards and squares, greenery, social services, buildings etcetera. For each aspect the user answers a number of questions in relations to these aspects and related assessment criteria. This is preferably done in a process of co-creation with a variety of actors as well as in relations to documents such as policies, economic estimations etcetera. Furthermore, the tool helps the user define goal conflicts as well as issues in relation to plan implementation that needs to be dealt with. Also, an appendix in the form of a MS Excel documents lets you complement the qualitative assessment with a quantitative analysis which results in a radar chart.

PRISMA is available for free and can be used during different stages of an urban development process, from the initial phase when an idea is developed, through the planning and implementation phases to the administration and management phase. Out hope is that PRISMA will be able to help city development processes become more transparent, effective and well-reasoned.