Before a place can be nice, someone has to find out what isn't - yet.
Meet Inspector Nice: a normative decision-making tool that investigates the current state of a place, so we can co-create what it needs to become nice. Built for residents, municipalities, developers and researchers alike, anyone curious enough to ask what their street actually needs.
Ever wondered how hot your street gets in summer? Whether that corner bench is any good, what energy label the buildings around you carry, or how clean the air you actually breathe is? With Inspector Nice, click anywhere on the map in Utrecht and see how your street stacks up against European benchmarks.
Inspector Nice brings together 29 indicators across 30+ data layers, merging official municipal registries (noise, flood risk) with open-source community data (OpenStreetMap) and live environmental APIs (Open-Meteo). And on top of that evidence, every case comes with a fix: concrete improvements, the ROI over time, and the subsidies that could pay for it.
It's about making the invisible visible, so we can build a city that's actually just, resilient, and human.
Click. Inspect. Make it nice.
Cities are getting more expensive, lonelier and hotter
-
3 in 4 young adults feel lonely regularly, even living in dense cities (WHO)
-
47% of public space is taken up by parked cars, not people (ADAC)
-
Some streets run +4.5°C hotter than others nearby — just because they lack shade (Copernicus)
How it works
Look
Every street on the map, colour-coded by its NICE Score, built from 8 dimensions: climate, health, mobility, education, housing, democracy, ecosystem, and resilience.
Inspect
Click any street to see what's actually behind the score - bench condition, tree cover, air quality, noise, safety- real, checkable evidence, not a vague label.
Improve
Get concrete proposals for how to fix it, the ROI over time, and the subsidies that could fund it.