Thessaloniki, 3-5 September. URBiNAT Consortium partners Americo Mateus (GUDA – Lisbon), Nathalie Nunes (CES – Coimbra), Ingrid Andersson (IKED – Malmö), and Knud Erik Hilding-Harmann (DTI – Copenhagen) were invited to conduct a workshop during the Open Living Lab days organised by ENOLL, the European Network of Open Living Labs to conduct a workshop . The URBiNAT team took this opportunity to establish the foundations for a sustainable community of practice on citizens participation in sustainable development. Prior to the workshop a word analysis was carried out on all European living labs to identify and cluster common key words of interest for living labs. It resulted in four clusters of key words that we took as “work in progress” to the workshop. We also brought the list of factors that URBiNAT has identified as important for successful citizens participation.
At the workshop we presented our approach to citizens participative processes in the development of living labs for healthy corridors and we used the tool Mentimeter to engage with the 40 workshop participants. With Mentimeter, we allowed the participants to propose the most important factors in each of the clusters as well as proposing names for the four clusters. The participant then contributed their own experiences with their chosen cluster group and each group produced a statement that they would like to unfold in a coming Zoom meeting which will take place on 29th October during three zoom meetings with the following topics developed at the workshop:
- Plunge (have guts) – risk as a means to the cutting edge.
- How can we inspire a new meaning of life? – How do we create togetherness being authentic, transparent, inclusive, working on a shared agenda and common vision?
- We need to go local to be able to scale up. But how can we do sustainably? (Key word seeding/obvious change)
URBiNAT was also invited to contribute in a round table on ‘Human and Nature Centred Cities’, in a session ‘Scaling up challenges‘, moderated by Charles Landry, Chair of the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Innovating Cities.
Participants were invited to share with other projects and cities:
- examples of tools/solutions (systemic, cross-sectorial and solutions) implemented in cities that can be replicated, adapted and up-scaled by other European cities and beyond;
- examples of processes (participatory multi-stakeholder, co-creation etc.) already implemented in cities that could be further advanced and scaled-up to other European cities and beyond.
Participants were also asked to comment on The European Commission High-Level Expert Group (HLEG) Report ‘The human centred city: opportunities for citizens through Research & Innovation’.
The Report will advise the European Commission on how to formulate its future strategies on research and innovation on innovating cities, particularly in view of the forthcoming Framework Programme for Research & Innovation Horizon Europe and the Mission on “Climate Neutral and Smart Cities”.
The draft Report is available here:
