Citizen and Community Engagement in Urban Living Labs (Internship project)

To achieve these goals, a bottom-up approach was used to design workshops that would engage participants. This included conducting 19 interviews and a survey with citizens and community representatives from the three mentioned neighborhoods to understand their interests in plastic pollution workshops and their level of awareness on the topic. Additionally, project partners were consulted to gather their perspectives and input on the workshops. Insights from these groups were synthesized to design multiple workshop scenarios, leading to the successful implementation of 3 multistakeholder co-creation workshops.

During the workshops, citizens, community representatives, researchers, employees from various Gemeente Municipality departments, AMS staff, and students exchanged knowledge and collaborated to develop creative and practical solutions to plastic pollution in Amsterdam. The ideas generated included:
1. Educating tourists through engaging videos displayed in public spaces, offering free cruises linked to canal clean-ups, providing pocket ashtrays, and encouraging the return of cigarette filters in exchange for donations to city projects.
2. Involving people in need in plastic waste collection using soft collection methods (e.g., bicycles).
3. Educating children through fun, interactive school activities to promote environmental awareness from an early age.

For more details about the internship project, its results, scenarios for multistakeholder workshops, and participatory tools and exercises, please refer to the attached document or contact Francesca Alberti via email at Francesca.Alberti@ams-institute.org.