Quantitative Baseline Survey
for Urban Design

Building the foundation
so dialogue doesn't dissolve into impressions.

A long-term vision is drafted together with residents. In that dialogue, each participant speaks from their own lived sense of the city. That sense is valuable — but when discussion is built on impressions alone, it drifts. Sometimes the loudest voice ends up deciding the outcome.

This project organized, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the structural changes everyone needed to hold as a shared premise before that dialogue began — building the baseline analysis the discussion could start from. The goal was never to get a forecast exactly right. It was to get everyone looking at the same map.

Not a single forecast —
a range.

Present future population as one number, and debate gets pulled into arguing over whether that number is right. Instead, alongside a baseline that extends current trends, we designed three scenarios — policy succeeding, and policy failing — and presented the future as a range.

Projections were built not only for the city as a whole but district by district, in a single model where the district totals reconcile with the citywide figure. We validated accuracy with backtests that forecast the past from earlier data, and the report states the limits of the numbers plainly — including the fact that smaller districts carry larger relative error. To earn trust in the numbers, you have to be honest about what the numbers can't tell you.

Population, infrastructure, industry, sentiment.
Four lenses, layered together.

The real issue isn't population decline itself — it's what happens downstream of it: a shrinking workforce, services reaching their limits, the sustainability of industry. We layered analyses of very different kinds to render that structure in three dimensions.

• METHOD 01
  Population & Workforce Projections

  Future population is projected by district under three scenarios, using the cohort-component method. Beyond total population, we read off the timing of peak working-age population (the workforce) and peak care demand.
• METHOD 02
  Infrastructure & Living-Service Sustainability Analysis

  We overlay the distribution of public-transit gaps with the population thresholds each facility type needs to remain viable (drawn from probability-of-presence figures based on a national survey), sorting out district by district which services carry the highest risk of withdrawal.
• METHOD 03
  Visualizing Vacant Homes and Area "Voids"

  We overlay the locations of vacant homes with the distribution of elderly single-person households on a map. Reading vacancy as a density relative to population — rather than a raw count — surfaces the districts closest to the limit of community viability.
• METHOD 04
  Industrial Structure Analysis

  Working from the regional input-output table, we calculate influence coefficients, sensitivity coefficients, and adjusted location quotients to identify the core industries earning income from outside the region, and how that income ripples outward.
• METHOD 05
  Public Sentiment Survey Analysis

  We extract priority issues from the gap between how "important" and how "satisfying" residents rate each policy area, then dig into free-text responses to put into words the things residents most don't want to lose.

The numbers became something to talk from.

• OUTCOMEProduced a baseline analysis report (discussion paper) presented at workshops, establishing shared understanding for the dialogue
• OUTCOMEBuilt district-level, three-scenario population/workforce projections in a single model, through to backtested accuracy validation
• OUTCOMEOrganized infrastructure and living-service sustainability limits by district, structuring the question of what to keep and where to concentrate resources
• OUTCOMEExtracted priority issues from analysis of the public survey and connected them to the questions driving the vision