Background
Think City is an urban-impact organisation based in Malaysia with a simple ambition: to make cities "more people-friendly, resilient, and liveable." A regional citymaking agency, it works across placemaking, resilience, analytics, and conservation, and wants to change the way cities are planned, developed, and celebrated.
In 2018, Think City started developing a concept for open geodata sharing, delivered through a friendly web-map platform. The goal was to democratise location data — to let citizens find out what is happening in their own neighbourhoods quickly, something the team sees as essential to healthy urban change. For Senior Manager and Analytics Team Lead Dr. Ceelia Leong, the choice of platform came down to how approachable it was:
We chose Mango for our map visualisation and narrative because of its simplistic and straightforward nature. The interface is light and easy to navigate on desktop or mobile, making it useful to both our on-ground survey teams and the active public — and Mango's consistent, excellent customer service has always been responsive and collaborative.
The problem Mango solved
In 2019, Think City launched Urban Analytics, an open geodata portal built on Mango. It has since become the centre point for discovering, interpreting, and communicating meaningful patterns in data — a hub for collecting, cleaning, integrating, analysing, and visualising information for Malaysian cities.
Mango's simple interface let Think City sidestep the technical complexity of publishing spatial data online, while still leaving room to be creative with how a map reads — playing with data juxtaposition and colour to make patterns land.
Results
By publishing and democratising geodata, Think City has built a connection between governments, private agencies, policymakers, urban strategists, and the general public — giving everyone access to the same up-to-date data to make better decisions and shape more people-friendly cities.
Mango has been fundamental to the Urban Analytics portal, and key to communicating some of Think City's most significant work, including the Kuala Lumpur Creative and Cultural District Strategic Master Plan and the George Town World Heritage Site population and land-use study.
