The findings of the four projects can be organised under two categories:
- infrastructural aspects of making cities more sustainable
- co-production and meaningful and inclusive participation
Diverse perceptions of urban green spaces: understanding social and demographic differences
The first category involves lessons about making cities more sustainable and improving the health and well-being of citizens, as well as cities themselves as well-functioning ecosystems. Cities are not merely an assembly of human-made artefacts; they are also ecosystems with
interconnected social, ecological, and technological systems. Urban green infrastructures are integral and significant factors in maintaining cities as ecosystems, as well as in alleviating stress and improving the well-being of citizens. Research suggests that the perceived aesthetic qualities of the landscape as well as its soundscape may be potentially beneficial factors.
Urban green infrastructures as health-promoting facilities also have important implications for equality and justice. Like all limited resources, the uneven distribution of urban green infrastructures can be a source of inequality and injustice. This is particularly the case for more disadvantaged neighbourhoods of cities, where hardship because of social and economic vulnerability can be further exacerbated by the limited availability of green
infrastructures. The findings from the projects call for our attention to the distribution of green infrastructures, with increased sensitivity to their availability for different socio-demographic and socio-economic groups.
However, it should also be noted that urban green infrastructures are not perceived and experienced in the same way by different social and demographic groups in cities. It is, therefore, important to emphasise that urban green infrastructures are not miracle cures; it is as important to understand their implications for different groups as it is to emphasise their positive contributions to urban lives and ecosystems.
Local knowledge as a catalyst for democracy and legitimacy
The second category of findings stems from the projects’ innovative approaches to generating practical, applicable, and policy-relevant knowledge with increased citizen engagement and participation. These findings resonate strongly with the initiative’s emphasis on co-production, and the use of digital participatory methods that can be developed in smart city frameworks. The projects thus present new perspectives on using smart tools to increase citizen engagement and participation, to complement scientific research with knowledge generated through citizen engagement and, more broadly, to improve forms of engagement between decision-makers, experts, and the public, thus potentially nurturing a more inclusive and democratic ethos.
The projects highlighted the importance of local knowledge for informing local planning solutions. Local knowledge and its integration into planning practice has the potential to bring diverse realities of people and their day-to-day life practices into the frame. Some projects explicitly highlight that a place-based approach may help to set priorities by introducing local knowledge from day-to-day life into planning practice, such as by connecting environmental characteristics and design with personal experiences and behaviour.
The projects demonstrate that the use of digital participatory methods carries the potential to better understand green infrastructures and their significance for the people who use them. Such methods allow researchers to identify places and the values attached to them, negative or positive, by urban residents, who themselves contribute to the production of knowledge. Consequently, the citizens’ local and experiential knowledge, as well as their values, can be incorporated into formal planning procedures, which is key for democracy, legitimacy, and participation. The data gathered can then be used to diagnose problems or gaps in existing green spaces and in the designing of green spaces of different scales and scopes that cater for the various health and well-being needs of different people. The challenge remains, however, to translate the vast amounts of data and local knowledge into workable planning solutions, which points to the need to complement the use of such tools with other participatory and co-production-oriented processes and procedures.
Digital participation methods and tools offer numerous possibilities
Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) is one of the most widely used place-based digital participatory planning tools applied across the projects. PPGIS are online, digital, map-based surveys that have been applied by hundreds of cities in order to realise large-scale public participation and to collect place-based knowledge from individuals in large numbers. In addition, it enables vulnerable or marginalised social groups to be reached. This tool has the potential to register community voices and citizens’ subjective perspectives, including the meanings and values that they attach to specific places. Consequently, the use of such tools has the potential to establish links between smart city practices and green initiatives, including the planning of urban green infrastructures, and nature-based solutions in general. Furthermore, the use of such tools, complemented by deeper qualitative research, has the potential to reveal a sense of place shared by citizens that stands in stark contrast to the official framing of stigmatised neighbourhoods.
Citizens’ experiential, local knowledge is a vital component of urban planning, and PPGIS can offer practitioners the opportunity to gather map-based experiential knowledge in order to provide insight for planning, designing, and managing green infrastructures. This tool allows researchers to map citizens’ use of and interaction with places, integrating both landscape and, if desired, soundscape perceptions.10 Consequently, both perceived and objective indicators for access to green space and for health are gathered in order to make a more comprehensive evaluation of how citizens access and use green spaces, and the implications for their health and well-being.
Another digital participation tool employed by the projects saw the creation of interactive innovation platforms. Such platforms are designed to bring citizens, businesses, and other stakeholders together to work on identifying problems and devising solutions. Such platforms, especially if used starting from the early phases of planning interventions, allow municipalities to engage different social groups, and provides a broader spectrum of approaches. Importantly, such platforms have the capacity to engage not only different social groups, but also different age groups through, for example, the use of digital games as a tool for engaging a younger population.
The projects point to other possibilities for engaging broader audiences, albeit not as participation tools as some of the other methods used. Citizen science can also be used to engage citizens to contribute to the production of knowledge, an example of which is environmental co-monitoring, which involves the engagement of citizens in measuring air quality in an attempt to understand the effects of residential wood burning.11 In this particular case, the researchers took advantage of the latest developments in air pollution technologies and used low-cost air quality sensors that were placed in the gardens of the participants’ houses. The data gathered complemented data from official air quality monitoring stations, which enabled the researchers to create more accurate air quality
maps to understand the adverse effects of residential wood burning. This example demonstrates how citizens can contribute to data collection for more effective monitoring, which might benefit decision-making through the provision of more data. However, this is an example of co-monitoring, not of co-production; the citizens are involved in the monitoring, but not in the processes that concern what happens to the data and how it is used.
The projects offer several other important lessons about the challenges of using participatory tools for citizen engagement. Some of these challenges are more scientific in nature, such the calibration of the data, data quality, access, and storage. Other challenges relate to social relations and the politics of knowledge production, which may hinder both research and co-monitoring. These challenges include establishing trust (between citizens, city officials, and researchers), building confidence in citizen-collected data, maintaining citizen engagement over time, and aligning the motivations of citizens, city officials, and
researchers.
Balancing empowerment and realistic expectations in public participation
Across the four projects, a variety of novel methods of co-production have been deployed to reach out to, include, and engage various societal groups, especially those who are often excluded from conventional participatory practices in planning (e.g., public consultation). Importantly, “the public” was often addressed in a more nuanced way; specific social groups were targeted, which enabled a more adequate and effective choice of tools and approaches for their engagement. Some examples are: citizen engagement and public debate through the co-production of public data using the citizen science method (NordicPath); participatory budgeting (CaPs); engaging residents who had not previously been involved, in the future of the local public realm using PPGIS (NORDGreen); use of the online game (ByMaker) to reach school students (CaPs); inclusion of residents’ perspectives in the urban planning process (UrbanPlanen) for a disadvantaged area (Smarter Green Cities); deployment of a PPGIS module for classroom teaching; and the use of Pavilions for immersive soundscapes.
Such methods and tools give a sense of empowerment to the participants. It is important, however, to be very clear not only about how the participants can engage, but also about what the limitations of their engagement will be. This is important when it comes to giving them a more realistic sense of their feeling of empowerment. The projects, therefore,
recommend a more reflective use of digital tools for enhancing participation, communicating to the participating public very clearly what aspects of the projects they can influence and to what extent. Otherwise, there is a risk that these tools will backfire, and generate a feeling of frustration rather than empowerment.