Since its establishment in 2012, the “Made in Murmansk” has delivered eye-opening projects in Murmansk, the world’s biggest city north of the Arctic Circle. With playful interactivity, the initiative is giving birth to new community-based efforts of urban planning in the Soviet-looking provincial capital.
“It can be done in Murmansk”, Stepan Mitaki, one of the initiators of Made in Murmansk, says to BarentsObserver. “What we do is to stimulate creativity and innovation by doing awesome stuff”, he adds. “We want to show others that it can be done in Murmansk and give them an example”.
The five people behind the initiative first developed the “Trolley Hunt”, a mobile web-based app which lets users of the Murmansk public transport system know exactly when the next trolleybus arrives to their chosen busstop. From before, all the local trolley buses had been equipped with wireless Internet connection, and the “Trolley Hunt” uses GPS data from the respective bus.
Mitaki and his fellow entrepreneurs then moved on with the development of “My Murmansk”, a project which invites anyone interested in local development to propose measures of improvement to city life. In the course of less than a week after project launch, tens of proposals were registered on the project interactive map and today several hundred ideas have been presented, covering a full spectre of fields from small playground development to big infrastructure projects.
While some of the proposals may seem utopian, like the construction of a tunnel under the Kola Bay, others are practically oriented and would be easy to facilitate, like e.g. the extension of a bus route or the removal of stray dogs from an area. So far, the most popular idea with the biggest number of votes is the reestablishment of a small-boat harbor near the city centre.
While initiatives like the Made in Murmansk can play a potentially significant role in local development and be used by the authorities as a valuable additional tool in urban planning, the local government does not always pay attention.
“Yeah, they like the idea, they even say that they love it, but they are not doing anything to help”, Mitaki says about the Murmansk regional administration. “Some of them say they love the idea of Open Data and understand the benefits, but that they simply cannot help us due the bureaucracy process”, he adds.
As previously reported, Murmansk Governor Marina Kovtun has made the diversification of regional economy a top priority. Today, the Murmansk economy is strongly dependent on the wellbeing of a handful of big industrial enterprises.
