Background
The City of Minneapolis needed a better way to share its 2040 comprehensive plan with residents.
In the past, city plans were usually published as static documents. That made the information available, but it did not make it easy for residents to explore the plan, understand specific policies, or take part in the conversation.
For Minneapolis 2040, the city wanted something different. The goal was to create an interactive city planning website that made the comprehensive plan easier to read, easier to navigate, and easier for residents to respond to.
Accessibility and mobile usability were essential. The website needed to work for all residents, across devices, while giving city staff a practical way to update content as the plan developed.
Emergent Software partnered with the City of Minneapolis to build a first-of-its-kind interactive city plan website using Umbraco CMS.
Solution
Emergent Software used Umbraco CMS to create a flexible website for the Minneapolis 2040 comprehensive plan, with custom tools built around public engagement, accessibility, and city content management.
The team started with Umbraco’s content editing tools, then customized the CMS to support the structure of the city plan. That included complex relationships between goals, policies, topics, and implementation items, making the plan easier to organize and easier for residents to explore.
A custom feedback plugin allowed residents to comment on specific parts of the plan. This gave the City of Minneapolis a more direct way to collect input from the community and review feedback as the plan evolved.
Emergent Software also built change tracking into the website, giving residents more transparency into what parts of the plan changed based on public feedback.
The website was developed to meet WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility standards and built responsively so residents could use it across desktop and mobile devices. The team also set up an Azure serverless infrastructure to support reliable deployments, scaling as traffic increased, and reduced downtime.
Impact
The Minneapolis 2040 website gave the City of Minneapolis a more open and useful way to share its comprehensive plan with residents.
Instead of asking people to read through a static planning document, the city could offer an interactive website where residents could explore goals, policies, topics, and implementation details in a more accessible format.
The website received thousands of public comments and significant traffic, exceeding the city team’s expectations. City staff also gained an easier editing experience in Umbraco CMS, giving them the ability to keep content organized and continue updating the site as the plan moved forward.
For the City of Minneapolis, the project turned a long-term planning document into a digital civic engagement tool. For residents, it made the future of the city easier to understand, comment on, and follow over time.
Results
