How the City of Modi'in Tracked the Performance of a Public Space and Planned Ahead Using Zencity

In 2010, the city of Modi’in opened the gates to a 1,400 acre, multi-use, public space – Anava Park. The park houses walking trails, recreational sports areas, playgrounds, and more. It’s also home to a number of facilities that help offset the park’s operational costs like cafes and an outdoor amphitheater. Since its opening, the city has spent close to $7 million maintaining and operating the park, with an average annual budget of about $1 million. The park has become a central space for the community, hosting hundreds-of-thousands of visitors every year and attracting community members from across the city. Additionally, the park has evolved into a significant regional tourist destination, drawing crowds from neighboring cities on a weekly basis.

After proving to be a valuable public resource for its residents, the City sought a holistic understanding of the park’s usage to budget for the park and to prioritize limited resources for new and improved park facilities in the years to come. It also wanted to optimize the different services in the park such as the amphitheater, to ensure the park’s self-sufficiency. They turned to Zencity to leverage its advanced AI algorithms and data analytics to assess the performance of the Anava Park project.

Over a four-month period, Zencity automatically aggregated thousands of city-wide resident-generated data points from sources like social media, local news sources, 311 and more. With the use of advanced AI, the data was categorized and sorted to analyze the feedback about the park including what topics or services were discussed, the sentiment of conversations, and trends in the discussion. Zencity’s platform visualized the data and transformed the data into actionable insights about Anava park by converting otherwise qualitative feedback into valuable, quantitative metrics, providing Modiin’s city leaders with a city-scale view of resident feedback to base decisions on.

Modi’in used Zencity as a next-generation citizen engagement tool to hear from a broad spectrum of residents in real-time and on an ongoing basis. It incorporated their feedback and priorities into their planning processes, using Zencity for real performance management:

With Zencity's help, we were able to analyze data based on real resident feedback, and make more data-driven decisions.

Ron Barazani

CEO/City of Modi'in Economic Development Authority - Ofek Mgmt, Modi'in, Israel