Presentation: 'Citizen Voices in Climate Action: The role of interface design in digital engagement'
"With a large part of the built environment privately owned in many European cities, citizen engagement is crucial for the success of sustainability initiatives in urban areas. The use of digital platforms and tools can support this process, given their potential to enable remote participation, reach a large number of citizens, and enhance governance transparency. However, many digital platforms for citizen engagement in sustainability action remain underutilised.
This study adopts a user-centric perspective to analyse the interface design of over ten digital platforms and identify design elements that hinder or foster engagement. Our analysis highlights four main interface issues: disconnection between scientific data and personal experience, complex navigation, information overload, and limited opportunities for action.
To overcome these limitations, we developed a set of design guidelines addressing four themes: Awareness and framing, Individual and collective action, Effective use of data, and Navigation and visuals. We implemented these guidelines in two prototypes, focusing on heat waves and biodiversity loss in urban areas. The prototypes were tested in workshop settings with positive feedback from participants, corroborating the importance of citizen-centric interface design in ensuring effective citizen engagement."
In the presentation, the researchers showed the Citizen Voices for Biodiversity (BIO-CiVo) and Citizens meet Climate (CmC) studies. Their goal is to design citizen-centric digital platforms that address the complexity of climate change and ensure engagement. Context analysis was performed at different levels: for the CmC-platform on city-level in Rotterdam, Amsterdam & Delft, and for the BIO-CiVo study on neighbourhood-level in Oud-Mathenesse (Rotterdam). The research is designed as recurring cycles of R-D-T: Research & Reflect - Design - Test. The testing was done by paper prototyping. By making use of visualization, personas and story-telling, the researchers contribute to a more inclusive field of climate action of citizens. In the slides you find more information on the background, methodology and design guidelines.
Presentation by Juliana Goncalves and Geertje Slingerland (TU Delft)
AMS Institute, Scientific conference 'Reinventing the City -Blueprints for messy cities? Navigating the interplay of order and complexity' The Old & New City (Diversity & Inclusion) - 23 April 2024
Presentation: 'Tourism and Urban Diversity in the UNESCO World Heritage Sites of Sassi di Matera and Amsterdam'
"This presentation explores the concept of diversity as a defining characteristic of cities and suggests that urban spaces tend to undergo cycles of growth and diversification. The research draws on the work of Jane Jacobs, which is expanded into a fully reproducible framework to study urban diversity. As part of our present conference contribution, we discuss our method for quantifying urban diversity and present a case study of the historic quarter Sassi in Matera, Italy, to illustrate how cities naturally evolve through cycles of growth and diversification. Particular interest is given to the role of tourism as part of this process, and a comparison is made with Amsterdam.
The research findings show that, since the 1980s, Sassi has become more diverse, in part due to tourism-related activities. However, the rapid expansion of the hotel industry has led to concerns about the loss of diversity in the case of further expansion. We use diversity maps to forecast the potential impact of further hotel expansion on urban diversity, highlighting the delicate balance between growth and diversity in cities. The case of Sassi is compared with a similar analysis in Amsterdam. The contribution relates to the topic “Blueprint for messy cities” because planners and politicians converged to evacuate Sassi in the 1950s, believing it was too much of a 'mess'. Our approach is designed to reveal the qualities that this 'mess' comes with."
What is urban diversity? In this presentation, Diana Della Pietra (MOST Architecture) talks about diversity as "the coexistence of different urban types such as restaurants, houses, churches, museums and so on" and concludes with this definition: “Diversity is the probability that any two different things meet”. This definition makes it a mathematical concept, and enables to actually measure urban diversity. Diana shares about the Diversity Index Method which consists of the following steps:
Defining urban diversity
Collecting data
Performing the analysis: Classification, Granularity & Diversity Index
Visualisation of the results
Validation of the results
Employing the empirical results
This methodology makes it possible to make predictions for urban policies. The researchers suggest a more localized approach to urban planning.
Presentation by Diana Della Pietra
AMS Institute, Scientific conference 'Reinventing the City -Blueprints for messy cities? Navigating the interplay of order and complexity' The Old & New City (Diversity & Inclusion) - 23 April 2024
Read more
Baciu, D. C., & Pietra, D. D. (2021, May 17). Cycles of Diversification in Urban Environments: Evidence from Sassi, UNESCO World Heritage Site, Italy. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/f43xh
Baciu, D.C., Mi, D., Birchall, C. et al. Mapping diversity: from ecology and human geography to urbanism and culture. SN Soc Sci2, 136 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-022-00399-4
Presentation: 'Mosaic governance and environmental governance: Can civil society contribute to inclusive transformations?'
"Cities are an increasingly important place for experiments connecting climate action with challenges around food, energy, biodiversity and social justice. The European Commission promotes nature-based solutions (NBS) as innovative strategy for urban sustainable transformations, balancing environmental and socio-economic outcomes of climate and biodiversity actions. However, NBS have been criticised for reproducing power-imbalances and producing negative justice impacts, including gentrification and exclusion of marginalized groups. Previous studies show that quality and structure of NBS governance processes are crucial for just transformation processes (Toxopeus et al., 2020). To enhance distributional, procedural and recognition justice, hybrid or multi-level governance processes have been suggested, aiming to balance top-down decision making with bottom-up perspectives, to foster cross-scale interactions between places and practices, recognize plural socio-cultural values of nature and use different modes of knowledge co-production to achieve outcome-oriented and process goal.
Based on case studies in three major European cities, we explore whether and how hybrid governance approaches, such as mosaic governance, may contribute to sustainable and just cities through fostering long-term collaborations between local governments, local communities, and grassroots initiatives in the co-development and co-management of NBS. Based on previous studies into urban governance, empowerment of local communities, and environmental justice, we investigate six possible pathways for mosaic governance to increase the environmental justice impacts of NBS in cities: greening the neighbourhood, diversifying values and practices, empowering people, bridging across communities, linking to institutions, and scaling inclusive discourses and practices.
Despite the diversity of environmental justice outcomes across our empirical cases, analysis suggests that mosaic governance particularly contributes to recognition justice through diversifying NBS practices in alignment with community values and aspirations. Moreover, especially in marginalised communities, collaborations between civil society and local governments holds much potential to advance social justice by enabling empowering, bridging, and linking pathways across diverse communities and NBS. However, contributions to distributional and procedural justice are limited, also because the wider context of NBS policies, planning and management is hardly impacted by civil society actions. To advance our understanding of justice impacts of NBS and urban transformations, we suggest to look beyond distributional, procedural and recognition justice, and develop a wider framing of justice in the development and implementation of NBS, sensitive to social, cultural, economic and political inequities as well as to possible pathways to enhance not only environmental but also social justice."
In his presentation, Arjen Buijs (Wageningen University) emphasizes the importance of urban green and that's effect on mental and physical wellbeing. Unfortunately, urban green space is not distributed equally in cities: environmental justice is a big issue. There are three different dimensions of environmental justice:
Distributional justice: Equal distribution of green space and its benefits (De Vries et al, 2020)
Recognition justice: Use, access and suitability to needs and preferences (Kloek et al, 2018)
Procedural justice: Decisionmaking & governance
Arjen introduces the concept of 'Mosaic governance' which entails an interactive governance & mosaic landscapes & practices (Buijs et al 2019) and shares multiple examples of contribitions to environmental justice.
Presentation by Arjen Buijs (Wageningen University)
AMS Institute, Scientific conference 'Reinventing the City -Blueprints for messy cities? Navigating the interplay of order and complexity' The Old & New City (Diversity & Inclusion) - 23 April 2024
Read more
Arjen E.Buijs, Natalie M.Gulsrud, RominaRodela, Alan P.Diduck, Alexander P.N.van der Jagt, Christopher M.Raymond (2024) Advancing environmental justice in cities through the Mosaic Governance of nature-based solutions. Cities, 147, Article 104799.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2024.104799
Buijs, A.E. et al. (2019) Mosaic governance for urban green infrastructure: upscaling active citizenship from a local government perspective. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening Volume 40,April 2019, Pages 53-62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2018.06.011
de Vries S, Buijs AE, Snep RPH. (2020) Environmental Justice in The Netherlands: Presence and Quality of Greenspace Differ by Socioeconomic Status of Neighbourhoods. Sustainability. 12(15):5889. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12155889
Frantzeskaki, N.,et al . 2016. "Elucidating the changing roles of civil society in urban sustainability transitions." Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 22:41-50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2017.04.008
Kloek, M. E., Buijs, A. E., Boersema, J. J., & Schouten, M. G. C. (2018). Cultural echoes in Dutch immigrants’ and non-immigrants’ understandings and values of nature. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 61(5–6), 818–840. https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2017.1319803