Biography

Maarit Kahila has a background in planning geography from the University of Helsinki and urban planning from Aalto University, where she received her Ph.D. Her research focuses on new methods for enabling and encouraging wider public participation. In her dissertation, she studied the opportunities for urban planners to take advantage of map-based PPGIS tools like Maptionnaire to get ideas and insights from residents. Currently, she is the CEO and co-founder of Mapita, the company behind Maptionnaire. She continues to work in the domain of community engagement tools for urban planners and city developers. Maptionnaire is a powerful community engagement tool that helps urban planners and city developers to create map-based tools to get ideas and insights from residents - thus enabling and encouraging public participation. Maptionnaire is a SaaS service used in over 40 countries.