An Accessible City: How to Design a Clear Journey for Almaty Residents

Elmira Karmanova

Chief Project Manager, Almaty Development Center

31 August 2026

The more services, programs, venues and channels of interaction Almaty has, the more important the quality of transitions between them becomes. People encounter the city system not through the structure of institutions and departments, but through their own real-life needs: finding an opportunity for a child, proposing an initiative, obtaining support, joining a community, understanding a service, or figuring out what to do next. Formally, the right opportunity may exist and be open to everyone; in practice, access ends at the point where a person no longer understands the next step.

Accessibility Has a Second Dimension

In urban practice, accessibility is usually discussed in terms of distance, transport, physical barrier-free access, opening hours, digital channels and the availability of information. All of these parameters are fundamental. Yet any complex infrastructure carries another risk: an opportunity may be formally open but difficult to use because people have to decipher the system’s internal logic themselves, distinguish between the mandates of different organizations, and assemble their own journey from separate fragments.

This article uses the working concept of «semantic accessibility» to describe this quality. It is not presented as an established academic term, but as a practical framework for checking whether a person, without specialist knowledge of an organization’s structure, can understand whether a particular opportunity is relevant to them, what they need to do first, what outcome they can expect, and where the next step leads. Semantic accessibility does not oversimplify a service; it removes the need to become an expert in the system’s internal structure before being able to use it.

This framing aligns closely with contemporary approaches to public-service design. The OECD proposes looking at a service across the entire user journey—from the moment a person first tries to solve a problem until it is resolved. That journey may cross several organizations and channels, and the quality of an individual touchpoint does not guarantee the quality of the journey as a whole. In the OECD’s recommendations on seamless and accessible administrative services, this logic is expressed through a human-centred approach: priority is given to user needs, simpler interaction, and the proactive removal of barriers between people and services.

Working definition. Semantic accessibility is a person’s ability to understand an urban opportunity and take the next meaningful step without prior knowledge of how the system is organized internally.

Where the Real Constraint Arises

When managing complex systems, it is useful to examine not only the quality of individual elements but also the point that constrains the movement of the entire chain. This logic made Eliyahu Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints influential in management, although a production model obviously cannot be transferred literally to a city. For social infrastructure, the perspective itself is valuable: the weak point may be neither the library, community center, sports facility nor digital service, but the transition between them.

One venue may perform its own function well and correctly explain that the issue belongs to another organization. Yet the person’s journey still breaks if all they receive is the name of an institution, a general telephone number or a link to a homepage. Within each organization the work may be formally complete, while from the person’s perspective the task remains unresolved. This is why analysis by institutional boundaries and analysis by user journey can produce fundamentally different pictures.

For this reason, discovering an interaction problem does not always call for a new project, another chat, a separate platform or an additional event. It is often more useful first to reconstruct the journey and identify where the person lost track of what was happening, encountered unclear language, failed to receive confirmation that their request had been handed over, or did not understand what was expected next. Sometimes the most effective improvement is very small: changing a phrase, adding one clear transition, agreeing on a handover between two organizations, or assigning responsibility for feedback.

The Human Journey as the Unit of Analysis

If the goal is to improve semantic accessibility, the unit of analysis becomes neither the institution nor even the service itself, but a person’s specific journey. It begins with a real-life need and ends not with a formal response but with a clear next state: the problem is resolved, an action has been completed, the request has been handed over with confirmation, or the person knows exactly what to do next. This view is close to service design, where an end-to-end journey reveals gaps that remain invisible when individual channels are assessed separately.

For practical work, it is useful to divide the journey into several stages. Each tests not the friendliness of staff, but the quality of the interaction design: how a person recognizes an opportunity, how clear the first entry point is, whether their real-life need can be translated into the language of a specific service, who is responsible for handovers between organizations, what counts as a completed action, and how feedback is provided. This decomposition turns the vague instruction to «improve communication» into a set of observable points.

Testing a Single Journey

Journey stage	Key question	Typical gap	What can be checked
Recognition	Does the person understand that this opportunity applies to their situation?	Information exists, but the person does not recognize their need in it.	Language of the announcement, examples of situations, and channels through which people learn about the opportunity.
First entry point	Is the first action clear without additional clarification?	There are several contacts and forms, but it is unclear where to start.	Number of entry points, simplicity of the first action, clarity of registration.
Understanding the request	Can the person explain the problem in their own words?	The person is expected to know the institution’s terminology in advance.	How staff clarify the request, whether diagnostic questions are used, and whether the response is understandable.
Handover	If another organization is responsible, who manages the transition?	The person is given a link or phone number, effectively returning responsibility for the search to them.	Is there a specific contact, confirmation of handover, and a clear timeframe for the next response?
Action	Do both sides understand what happens next?	The consultation ends with a general recommendation but no next step.	Are the action, deadline, responsible party and expected result specified?
Feedback	Does the person learn how their request or contribution was resolved?	After the request or participation, there is silence.	Response channel and timeframe, explanation of the decision, and an opportunity to ask a follow-up question.
Continuation	Is it clear how to return, become more deeply involved, or begin a new cycle?	Every subsequent contact starts as if it were the first.	Is context retained, and is there a clear next level of participation or service?

Information Provision and Accessibility Produce Different Outcomes

For a complex organization, it is natural to increase the volume of information: instructions, website sections, forms, contacts, guidance notes, QR codes and FAQs appear. Yet the quantity of published material does not show how easy it is for a person to take action. In its guidance on citizen participation, the OECD emphasizes the value of continuous, clear and understandable communication in plain language, as well as the need to consider the participant’s entire journey. The same principle applies beyond formal participation processes: information becomes functional only when it helps a person move forward.

The distinction is simple but useful: informational openness answers the question of whether information is available, while semantic accessibility asks whether a person can use that information to make a decision and take the next step. The two indicators are related but not identical. «Everything is on the website» describes the state of the organization; «the person understood what to do next» describes the quality of interaction.

This is especially visible in youth policy, culture and sport, where many opportunities require not a single action but movement between roles: learning about a program, attending for the first time, feeling confident enough to return, joining a regular group, proposing an initiative, taking responsibility, or approaching another venue. If the transitions between these roles are unclear, high attendance at individual events can coexist with shallow subsequent engagement. Only a journey-based view reveals this.

Community Management as an Interface Function

The professional value of community management is particularly visible at these transition points, if community management is understood more broadly than organizing events and communicating with a regular audience. In different institutions this function may be performed by a community manager, librarian, curator, administrator, program coordinator or venue manager. The substance is similar: recognize a person’s need, translate it into the language of available opportunities, connect them with the right people, support the transition, and gradually make the system less dependent on personal mediation.

Ichak Adizes’ management idea of complementary roles is useful here: a complex system does not become resilient simply because one employee can do everything, and the expectation of an «ideal all-purpose specialist» usually only conceals weaknesses in the process. For an urban venue, it is more important that different competencies connect without losing the person along the way. An employee does not have to solve someone else’s task, but should understand the boundary of their own function and have a workable way to pass the journey onward.

This perspective is also close to the practical logic of the book In Search of Element X, created as a hands-on guide to community development: a sustainable community does not emerge from one successful event, but from consistent work with people, relationships, roles and the ability to act together. For urban infrastructure, an important professional conclusion follows: good community management creates not dependence on one well-connected coordinator, but repeatable transitions that continue to work when people change.

What Can Be Measured Without Turning Interaction into Reporting for Reporting’s Sake

Semantic accessibility is difficult to reduce to a single indicator, and that is arguably an advantage because the framework is intended for diagnosis rather than ranking institutions. A few simple observations can already reveal the quality of a journey: how many people complete an action after the first contact, where journeys most often stop, how many referrals end in a confirmed handover, how long it takes to receive the first clear response, and whether the person understands the next step after the interaction.

It is also useful to distinguish between two types of return. If a person has to contact the organization again because the first interaction did not provide clarity, this signals friction. If they return because they saw a next opportunity, joined a group or decided to take on a more complex role, it signals a developing relationship. The same metric—«repeat contact«—can describe opposite processes when stripped of context, so quantitative data should be supplemented with a short qualitative question about the reason for the next contact.

For internal professional reviews, it is enough to regularly select several real journeys and reconstruct them step by step: what the person came with, what they saw first, how their request was understood, where a handover occurred, how long the journey took, how it ended, and what remained unclear. Such a review requires fewer resources than a new satisfaction survey and often identifies more quickly the specific point where a small change can improve the entire experience.

Almaty: Adding a Map of Human Journeys to the Spatial Map

For Almaty, the topic is particularly relevant because urban planning already has a well-developed language of spatial analysis. Kuanysh Kusherbay’s monograph on organizing urban planning with GIS technologies, using Almaty as a case study, demonstrates the value of spatial data for understanding urban structure. In social infrastructure, it is useful to add a second layer alongside the map of facility locations: not only where a library, community center, cultural venue or sports facility is located, but how people actually enter these points, where they go next, and where their journeys most often break down.

These two layers answer different questions. Spatial accessibility shows how close an opportunity is and how facilities are distributed; journey analysis helps explain why a nearby opportunity may remain effectively invisible to a particular group, why one channel leads a person to act while another leads them to give up, and where physical proximity fails to translate into actual use.

A practical research pilot for Almaty could observe several dozen journeys across different types of urban venues—for example, libraries, youth community centers, cultural institutions and sports facilities. The aim would not be a representative assessment of the entire system, but the identification of recurring gaps. For each journey, it would be sufficient to record the initial need, first entry channel, number of transitions, moments of confusion, method of handover between organizations, outcome and next step. Comparing different venues would quickly show which problems are local and which arise regardless of institution type.

This approach is especially valuable because it does not require starting with large-scale reform. Some gaps can be eliminated through wording, navigation and the first-contact scenario; others through an agreement between two organizations; and some will reveal a systemic issue that genuinely requires a separate solution. The more precisely the point of failure is identified, the lower the risk of responding to a small problem with an unnecessarily expensive tool.

One Principle, Different Territories

Across Kazakhstan’s regions, the principle of semantic accessibility remains relevant, but the architecture of the journey may look different. A small town or village has fewer formal entry points, while personal connections and specific individuals—a school principal, librarian, teacher, akimat specialist, coach, entrepreneur or active resident—play a much larger role. This density of relationships shortens some distances but creates another vulnerability: access to an opportunity may depend not on a clear process, but on whether a person knows «who to ask.»

Therefore, the same digital service or organizational model will not produce the same result in a metropolis and a small settlement. In Almaty, the problem may be an excess of fragmented entry points and the difficulty of choosing among them; in a village, it may be the limited number of entry points and dependence on a personal intermediary. In such cases, it is more useful to scale the principle—the person should understand the next step and should not have to carry the complexity of the system’s internal structure—while designing the specific channel around the local context.

Practical Minimum: 7 Questions Before Launching or Redesigning a Program

Before launching a new program, service or public venue, it is useful to conduct a short check that requires no separate research and can be carried out by the team itself. Seven questions should be answered in sequence:

• Does the person recognize their situation in the description?
• Is the first action clear?
• Can they explain the request in layman's terms?
• Does the employee understand what to do with a request outside their area of ​​expertise?
• Is there a confirmed transfer instead of a general redirect?
• Does the person receive a result or an explanation of the result?
• Does the person understand what they can do next after the contact is over?

If at any stage the answer relies on phrases such as «people usually figure it out themselves,» "it is on the website,» "we give them a phone number,» or «what happens next is no longer our responsibility,» that is precisely the stage worth testing through real journeys. For a professional team, this kind of audit is more useful than an abstract discussion about customer orientation because it identifies a specific point that can be changed and tested again.

A Semantically Accessible City

Any urban system inevitably remains complex: programs, people, mandates, technologies and residents’ needs all change. An ideal arrangement in which no journey ever breaks is therefore unlikely to be possible in Almaty or any other major city. A more realistic sign of maturity is the ability to notice a gap, understand its cause and adjust the next cycle of work before an individual difficulty turns into persistent distrust of an entire institution.

In this sense, accessibility becomes a common point of convergence for management, service design, project work and community management: management helps structure the process, service design reveals the user experience, project work tests solutions through specific hypotheses, and the community approach sustains relationships and transitions between people, groups and institutions. These functions do not require organizations to merge into a single management system; they require coordination at the points where a person’s journey crosses organizational boundaries.

Perhaps the simplest professional test for any urban venue is this: if a person has come to the wrong place, can they still take the next meaningful step? A city becomes more accessible not when organizational boundaries disappear, but when navigating those boundaries ceases to be the individual’s responsibility.

Sources and Professional References

1. OECD. OECD Guidelines for Citizen Participation Processes. OECD Public Governance Reviews, 2022. DOI: 10.1787/f765caf6-en.

2. OECD. OECD Good Practice Principles for Public Service Design and Delivery in the Digital Age. OECD Public Governance Policy Papers, No. 23, 2022. DOI: 10.1787/2ade500b-en.

3. Welby, B.; Tan, E. H. Y. Designing and Delivering Public Services in the Digital Age. OECD Going Digital Toolkit Notes, No. 22, 2022. DOI: 10.1787/e056ef99-en.

4. OECD. Government at a Glance 2025. Section «Seamless and accessible public administrative services«. OECD Publishing, 2025. DOI: 10.1787/0efd0bcd-en.

5. OECD. Digital Government Outlook 2026. Section on human-centred and proactive public services. OECD Publishing, 2026.

6. Goldratt, E. M.; Cox, J. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. The Theory of Constraints is used in this article as a management analogy for analyzing bottlenecks, not as a model of an urban system.

7. Adizes, I. K. Management Styles: Effective and Ineffective. Alpina Publisher. The article draws on the idea of complementary roles and rejects the expectation of an «ideal all-purpose manager.»

8. Kusherbay, K. Zh. Organization and Management of Urban Planning Using GIS Technologies: The Case of Almaty. Monograph. Moscow: MAKS Press, 2024. 175 pp. DOI: 10.29003/m3794.978-5-317-07134-9.

9. Karmanova, E.; Kurmanov, M. In Search of Element X: A Practical Guide to Building Communities. KOMUNITI project materials.

10. Makarov, A. People Matter More Than Processes: Tools for a Resourceful Leader in Team Management. Alpina PRO, 2025. 208 pp.

Note: the concept of «semantic accessibility» is used in this article as an authorial working framework and is not presented as an established academic term.