Hi #SmartCommunity friends, in this episode of the Smart Community podcast I have a wonderful chat with Boopsie Maran. Boopsie is the founder and director of urban strategy at Places for Good, a collaborative of community advocates, planners, landscape architects, and artists, in Auckland, New Zealand. 

Boopsie and I discuss her background and passion for walkability and ensuring the safety of kids independently travelling to school. We discuss what a Smart Community means to Boopsie and why the organisation is called Places for Good. 

We talk about how to ask the right questions to collect the necessary data to make better decisions and the difficulties with measuring and communicating liveability and walkability benefits, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Boopsie tells us about the project she’s working on now involving walkability infrastructure improvement for a stretch of land near a school in Auckland, and the problems with short-term political cycles in local governments when it comes to liveability projects. 

We finish our chat discussing the emerging trends of using apps to feed community input back to local governments, and where to next when it comes to the efficiency of feeding data back to the people that make decisions in Smart Cities and Communities. 

As always, we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it. 

Connect with Boopsie on LinkedIn 

Connect with Places for good via their website www.placesforgood.com or @placesforgood on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter 

Connect with me via email: [email protected] 

Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube

The Smart Community Podcast is produced by Perk Digital.