A suite of urban instruments

Tools for understanding and shaping the places we live.

Urbana East builds a growing suite of instruments — from board-based workshops to data platforms — that help schools, universities, communities, and city teams read what their neighbourhoods mean before they decide what to do with them.

01
CONNECT & LEARN
Workshops and games that teach people how to think about place, stakeholders, and trade-offs. Built for classrooms and communities.
02
DATA GATHERING
Professional instruments for capturing community and cultural intelligence at neighbourhood scale. Built for planners and heritage bodies.
03
INNOVATE & ACTIVATE
Tools that turn community intelligence into placemaking action. AR, participatory design, and more in development.

Blok Challenger — the stakeholder engagement game

A facilitated card-and-board exercise that teaches people how real planning decisions get made. Players build proposals using stakeholders, urban elements, policies, and visions — while managing budget and engagement targets.

STAKEHOLDER CARDS COST 4 · SCORE 10 URBAN ELEMENT CARDS COST 2 · SCORE P2 POLICY CARDS FREE · MANDATORY VISION CARDS COST 5 · SCORE P4 FOUR DECKS · BUDGET · ENGAGEMENT · REAL TRADEOFFS

A card game that teaches how cities actually get planned.

Teams take on real planning challenges and build proposals using four card decks — stakeholders, urban elements, policies, and visions — while managing a budget and engagement target.

Standard
Blok Challenger Kit
For schools, universities, community workshops — the full card-based game.
AED 500
per kit · includes free training modules
  • Complete card decks (Stakeholder, Urban, Policy, Vision)
  • Access to 8 published challenges
  • Facilitator training videos included
  • Solution Mat and scoring templates
  • 90-minute workshop format
Register interest
Add Urbana facilitator: AED 1,000 / OMR 100 per workshop in UAE & Oman.

Strata — the urban intelligence platform

A professional platform for capturing the living cultural intelligence of neighbourhoods. Used by planning teams, government, and heritage bodies to inform stakeholder engagement and urban planning projects.

Structured ethnographic fieldwork

A standardised protocol for capturing community narratives, cultural categories, and physical place anchors at neighbourhood scale.

Geotagged cultural intelligence

Every narrative connects to a mental-map totem on a real map. Outputs are GIS-compatible and integrate into existing planning workflows.

Temporal change signals

Distinguishes what a place is today, what it was, what it is becoming, and what residents envision — in a single integrated dataset.

Restricted access: Available to planners, government teams, heritage authorities and qualified institutional partners.
FALAJ SYSTEM Sidrah tree Al Ain spring Mosque majlis White House Mazra farms Makhrij route Ar Roulah GHALA · 156 NARRATIVES · 63 TOTEMS · 13 CULTURAL DIMENSIONS

Tools for turning intelligence into action.

The next layer of instruments — tools that translate community intelligence into actual placemaking decisions, designs, and interventions.

In development

AR Placemaking Tool

A real-time collaborative augmented-reality tool that lets participants test placemaking interventions on site — furniture, greenery, lighting, signage — before any physical change is committed.

More in the works

And other instruments

Participatory design tools, community vision platforms, and other instruments designed to take the intelligence Strata captures and turn it into shared action with communities and design teams.

Want to bring one of these tools to your work?

Whether you're a school facilitator, a planning team, or a foundation interested in partnership — we'd be glad to talk through which instrument fits your need and how it's deployed.

Get in touch