Citizen Participation Through ‘Interdisciplinary Experimentation’ Reclaming Waste and Permeable Green City Aarhus (original) (raw)
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2014
Nowadays, involving citizens into Local Environmental Governance (LEG) is becoming more and more important. In order to empower the role of citizen in this context, we propose an approach which relies on the establishment of a physical and intellectual space for shared understanding and collaboration between all stakeholders impacted by an environmental problematic (in our case odour emission). Based on the development of an Information Technology (IT) system allowing odour emission measurement as well as citizen feeling collect, a Living Lab (LL) approach, involving citizens, public authorities, industry and environmental Non-governmental organisations (NgoS) is being implemented. According to the definition of the European commission, Living Labs are “open innovation environments in real-life settings, in which user-driven innovation is fully integrated within the co-creation process of new services, products and societal infrastructures”. Based on this definition and considering,...
Sustainability, 2021
Participation and citizen engagement are fundamental elements in urban regeneration and in the deployment of nature-based solutions (NBS) to advance sustainable urban development. Various limitations inherent to participatory processes concerning NBS for inclusive urban regeneration have been addressed, and lessons have been learnt. This paper investigates participation and urban regeneration and focuses on the development of guidelines for citizen engagement and the co-creation of NBS in the H2020 URBiNAT project. The methodology first involves the collection of scientific and practical input on citizen engagement from a variety of stakeholders, such as researchers and practitioners, to constitute a corpus of qualitative data. This input is then systematized into guideline categories and serves as the basis for a deeper analysis with researchers, experts, and practitioners, both inside and outside URBiNAT, and in dialogue with other cases of participatory NBS implementation. The re...
Community Engagement in Urban Experiments: Joint Effort for Sustainable Urban Transformation
Landscape Architecture and Art, 2023
The increasing complexity of urban regeneration issues has recently made multi-stakeholder collaboration an important part to solve policy problems. While residents form an important part in a variety of collaborative governance processes, approaches used are often criticized as too formal, and lacking more inclusive participation. Therefore, new informal mechanisms of collaboration are sought, to ensure a more effective engagement and representation of population groups. Although community-led participation is the approach that leads to a more effective collaborative process, issues of power and inequality are a challenge in many places in planning practice [13]. Ways of civic empowerment, communication, and negotiation provide participants with transformative learning opportunities so that not only their arguments change but also the participants of the participation process themselves [6]. In order to test urban development ideas, the notion of "urban experiment" has been developed in recent years as a recognized and effective approach. The urban environment is viewed as a creative laboratory for testing the implementation of diverse initiatives and innovations [8]. The inner-city neighbourhoods in many cities are struggling to ensure vitality and liveability, thus these areas often represent a widespread location of urban experiments. In addition to these questions, the problem of community representation manifests itself in many inner cities. The potential to transform city centre streets and vacant areas into user-friendly urban spaces and the impact of those transformations on the city's liveability were recently tested by Riga municipality. Urban experiments varied in scale and form, resulting in street pedestrianization, urban gardens, and other temporary initiatives, which allowed more space for walking and cycling, street sales, social events and other activities. Thus, the aim of this article is to explore processes of testbed planning with regard to the role of community participation in the designing, implementing, and analysing phases of the experiment. After presenting the findings, the article concludes with a discussion on factors that influence public participation in collaborative governance including communication, the balance of interests, and the degree of resident involvement in decision-making.
Exploring the entry points for citizen science in urban sustainability initiatives
Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 2015
Citizen science is key to the success of Future Earth Initiatives for urban sustainability. Emerging research in urban land teleconnections highlights the benefits of incorporating theoretical insights from political ecology and participatory action research. Reviewing some of the forces propelling the recent popularity of citizen science, this article outlines challenges to processes of collaboration between scientists and non-scientists. We distinguish these concerns from others that may arise from the data or other products resulting from citizen science projects. Careful consideration of the processes and products of citizen science could engender a more fruitful relationship between professional scientists and their research communities and help universities to build effective partnerships with those in wider society whose expertise comes from their life experience.
Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology, 2022
The food bike (voedselfiets) project in the city of Hengelo (Netherlands) was designed to stimulate citizens to separate organic from residual waste. The food bikes take standard routes with designated stops to collect food waste from residents in high-rise neighbourhoods, which lack space to separate organic waste in garbage containers. Data were collected by a mix of qualitative research methods, which allowed to develop a holistic and contextualized view of the reasons why citizens joined this environmental initiative. The from literature well-known factors of idealism and self-interest can partly explain participation in the food bike project, but we have found that a habitus of not wasting food and social needs are also important reasons for people to participate. Especially older people take part in the project because the food bikes suit their habitus of frugality. The social interaction-behaving in a desirable way in the eyes of neighbours, and chatting at the bikes-stand in marked contrast to collection of waste by garbage trucks, in which contact is avoided as much as possible. The social aspect was reinforced during the Corona crisis, when indoor social contact was discouraged by the Dutch government. As it is, municipal efforts to promote pro-environmental behaviour build on the idealism and perceived self-interest of citizens, but could also make use of the social and emotional considerations of prospective participants and their attachment to the neighbourhood.
Local Environment, 2010
The scenario workshop is an example of the Scandinavian tradition of citizen involvement. The method is a mix of scenario and workshop. Scenarios produced by experts (scientists) are presented to a local community in a workshop lasting two to three days during which local participants produce criticism, debate and plans for community action. The method, originally used to actively involve citizens in the development of environmentally sustainable cities in Denmark, is now in use throughout Europe, as the various EU directorates have become very aware of their usefulness. A method has now been generated at the Copenhagen Business School for the field of transport. Four transport scenarios were generated relating to post-Fordist production systems, transport and the concept of sustainable mobility. They are to be presented in a transport-intensive region of Denmark to analyse bamers against environmentally induced adjustments to the transport sector and to find new solutions to the dilemma by creating dialogue between planners, politicians and transport managers.
Participatory Experiments from the Bottom up: The role of environmental NGOs and citizen groups
While there is a vast body of literature on participatory planning, researchers have hardly addressed the question of how traditional modes of governance can be turned into more democratic forms of decision-making. The aim of this article is to investigate to what extent non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can serve as change agents. Following the classical role of NGOs as a watchdog over governmental operations, it is hypothesized that participatory experiments instigated by NGOs might come closer to the communicative ideal than their government-initiated counterparts. The hypothesis is tested using an experiment with democratic planning in Haifa, Israel. The main conclusion of the analysis is that NGOs may be able to pressure governmental institutions into altering existing practices, but that the dominant actors remain the ones that shape such new practices. The consequence here being that NGO-instigated participatory practices suffer from the same shortcomings as the democratic experiments initiated by governmental bodies. The article ends with two suggestions on how NGOs could gain more control over the design of new democratic practices.
Innovative Forms of Citizen Participation at the Fringe of the Formal Planning System
In the Nordic countries, we are witnessing a proliferation of novel and more experimental ways of citizen and authority interaction within the field of urban planning and governance. These formats are seen in urban regeneration projects and planning experiments that endorse more inclusive interactions between public authorities and local actors than in the traditional formal hearings. The intention of this article is to explore the potential of these forms of participation in contributing to social innovation particularly related to including citizens that are difficult to reach, and in creating new arenas for interaction and collaboration. Theoretically, the article is inspired by the concepts of social innovation, planning
If we take the rhetoric of recent academic and policy discourse at face value, crossing disciplinary and institutional boundaries and engaging extra-scientific actors in the production and distribution of knowledge has become a kind of 'gold standard'. This is particularly true for fields like sustainability research, which is supposed to address the complexity of so-called 'grand challenges' of contemporary societies. Investigating the projects of a funding scheme for participatory sustainability research, this paper explores how researchers frame participatory research practices in their prospective narrations in research proposals and in their retrospective reflections in the framework of interviews. Thereby we focus on their stories about (1) the overall value of participation, (2) the roles allocated to different actors, (3) the temporal organization of participation as well as the (4) spatial dimension of collaboration. Building on this analysis, the paper concludes that even though participatory research programs create new possibilities, they remain limited in scope as they operate in an environment in which this kind of cross-boundary work does not fit the established standards. This strongly limits any form of "collective experimentation" and new ways of learning in sustainability research and beyond.
2021
Citizen social science has been developing in meaning and prevalence over the past few years, building on experiences with both citizen (natural) science and established social science methods such as participatory action research. However, most of the debate is still at the conceptual level, with strong calls for more empirical insight. Here, we critically examine the promises and challenges of citizen social science, based on two small-scale, co-created and locally embedded projects on people’s relationships with urban greenspaces and community food growing, conducted as a collaboration between professional and citizen social scientists. Our findings illustrate the complexity of such research in practice and identify five dilemmas that arise from tensions between the aspirations and hopes associated with co-created citizen social science, and the pragmatic and procedural realities of citizen research in practice. We argue that citizen social science projects will have to actively ...