Cities as Conversations: The Lasting Legacy of Seattle World Cup and AccessMap's Integrated Pedestrian Mapping System

Written by Lia Chon

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The final whistle has blown on the Seattle FIFA World Cup matches, but the tournament's legacy has unfolded far beyond the stadium pitch. The global event served as a major catalyst to permanently expand AccessMap, a University of Washington-developed city navigation project that maps real-world sidewalk conditions, steep slopes, and curb ramps to provide accessible routing for pedestrians.

"The legacy we hope to support is a city where accessibility is not treated as an add-on or a special request, but as a core part of how people experience Seattle," said Kunal Shah, a lead researcher at the University of Washington's Taskar Center for Accessible Technology. "When you understand the pedestrian environment well, almost everyone benefits."

Traditional navigation applications calculate the fastest route for vehicles, largely ignoring how people actually experience walking. Launched in 2017, AccessMap addresses this informational gap by recognizing that everyone arrives at the sidewalk with different abilities, preferences, trip purposes, and comfort levels.

"Even today, we know more about every lane of a freeway than we know about whether someone can comfortably reach the front door of a clinic, grocery store, transit stop, school, or stadium," said Anat Caspi, Director of the Taskar Center. "That imbalance became impossible for me to ignore."

Working directly with the Seattle FIFA World Cup 26™ Local Organizing Committee and the SEA&WIN team actively challenged researchers to expand the underlying platform itself.

"The collaboration actually became much more than integrating AccessMap into the FIFA visitor experience," Shah noted. "It challenged us to expand the platform itself. We realized that every major event and every community has important local knowledge that doesn't exist in a standard navigation system. Rather than building a one-time custom solution, we expanded AccessMap so it could support locally curated enhancements layered onto a common, open pedestrian data platform."

This meant incorporating crucial details far beyond the core sidewalk network. The tournament configuration integrated destination-specific data, including accessible entrances and detailed venue approaches, helping people confidently navigate from the sidewalk all the way to their exact destination.

To scale these complex networks ahead of the matches, the team combined artificial intelligence with extensive manual validation. Student researchers and local volunteers logged hundreds of hours cross-referencing satellite imagery against real-world terrain, ensuring the digital pathways accurately reflected temporary construction blockages, pavement degradation, and changing neighborhood conditions.

These enhancements were developed with the Local Organizing Committee, the SEA&WIN team, UW students, and community partners. People do not simply want to know where a building sits; they want to know which entrance to use, how to reach it, what barriers they will encounter, and whether the experience will be welcoming.

"One of the things I'm most excited about is that these capabilities now become part of the platform itself," Caspi said. "Future host cities, university campuses, transit agencies, neighborhoods, and major events can build on the exact same foundation by contributing their own locally meaningful information while benefiting from a shared, open pedestrian infrastructure. I guess I like to think of the platform as having a common language for pedestrian infrastructure with room for local dialects."

These localized enhancements did not expire when the event ended. The enriched pedestrian networks and destination information continue serving residents, businesses, and public agencies long afterward.

"The FIFA collaboration accelerated the expansion of Seattle's pedestrian data ecosystem, but that investment doesn't disappear when the tournament ends," Shah said. "That's a much better return on investment than building something for a single event and then walking away."

Ultimately, the team hopes Seattle can become an example that other cities can build on when it comes to the collaborative model of different organizations, and the broader community as a whole, coming together for the shared vision of making a city easier to understand and navigate.

"We believe the future lies in participatory civic infrastructure, where public agencies, researchers, businesses, community organizations, and residents all contribute to improving a shared understanding of how cities work,” Caspi said.

The philosophy of continuous, community-driven mapping takes center stage at the Taskar Center's annual Open The Paths conference. Running for eight years, the conference brings together elected officials, city leaders, transit representatives, and residents to share ideas, challenge assumptions, and shape the future of participatory design.

"The best cities aren't designed once," Caspi concluded. "They are continually improved through conversation with the people who use them every day."

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Acknowledgement: "This work represents the contributions of two funding sources supporting the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology. We'd like to acknowledge support from the Washington State sidewalks inventory and accessibility mapping legislative proviso, which helped advance the statewide pedestrian data ecosystem, and the U.S. Department of Transportation funded Transportation Data Exchange Initiative (TDEI), which has helped develop the broader open-standards and infrastructure that make this work possible. Additionally, there have been many organizations and individuals over more than a decade that helped us (the University of Washington's Taskar Center for Accessible Technology at the Paul G. Allen school), bring the work together: the Seattle FIFA World Cup Local Organizing (accessibility) Committee, the SEA&WIN team, the students and instructional assistants (especially Lacey Hampton) who helped collect and validate accessibility information, and our many community partners and disability advocates whose lived experience shaped the work."