*HUBBUB People’s Choice Winner – Tied for most promising climate impact.*
Audience Quote: “Shaded is a great simple but effective solution for urban shade creation and beautification, and really like the cave drawing idea”

What is Shaded? 

Shaded is a community driven web application that empowers Vancouver residents to nominate and upvote locations in need of urban shade, helping the City of Vancouver prioritize where shade is needed most. Through an interactive map, users can nominate spaces with a clear description of why the spot needs more shade. A toggleable heatmap helps discover unshaded areas, an optional AI feature suggests three locations based on Vancouver tree data, and users can browse other nominations along with the projected impact of each area. We created Shaded because we have all experienced increasingly hotter heatwaves in recent years, where access to urban shade was crucial. Our main motivation was that Vancouver’s existing request service, Van311, is not specific to urban shade and handles many unrelated requests. Our goal is to empower residents to take an active role in shaping the shade infrastructure in their neighborhoods, supporting Vancouver’s Urban Forest Strategy. By giving residents a way to voice their concerns, Shaded highlights these areas on the map so others can find and upvote them, helping the City identify where shade is needed most.

Beyond technical skills like integrating real Vancouver tree data into the heatmap and AI features, we learnt how to diagnose and fix issues as a team and divide work effectively across each sprint using a Trello board, holding daily meetings to track progress and stay aligned. We recommend expanding the Vancouver Open Data API to include additional details such as pedestrian heat exposure, pavement surface temperatures, and planting site information. These details would improve our development process by enhancing both the nomination form and the AI suggestion feature. We also recommend adding a way for the City to mark nominations as reviewed or approved, which would strengthen communication between residents and city staff.

Next Steps

Our team remains open to building on Shaded further especially if there is interest from the City or CityStudio. We believe Shaded has the potential to support Vancouver’s Urban Forest Strategy by giving residents a direct channel to advocate for shade infrastructure in their neighborhoods. Whether or not it moves forward formally, the project has given us valuable experience building a civic tech application with our local community in mind.