STRENGThENING URBAN GOVERNANCE BY PROMOTING CITIZEN-BASED CO-CREATION AND CROWD-SOURCING

GREENGAGE is a 3-year long pan-European Innovation Action funded under the Horizon Europe Framework Programme, further co-funded by the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding framework (UKRI) and Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI). Consortium, led by Austrian Institute of Technology, consists of 17 research and industry partners from the EU and the UK.

GREENGAGE aims to promote innovative governance process and help public authorities in shaping their climate mitigation and adaptation policies. To achieve this aim, the GREENGAGE project leverages citizens’ participation and equips them with innovative digital solutions thus providing the basis to co-create and co-design innovative solutions for monitoring environmental problems at ground level. The developed Citizen Observatories (CO) will be further incorporated into the urban planning decision-making process.

Objectives

  • Raise citizens’ awareness, interest, and engagement in urban environmental issues
  • Provide scientifically-sound and rigorous methods for citizen understanding of environmental data
  • Promote and ensure broader acceptance and implementation rates of data collected by citizens in policy- and decision-making
  • Promote the co-creation of data solutions for the urban environment
  • Establish synergies among partner cities, with other Citizen Observatories and environmental agencies to exchange best practices, ensure transferability, uptake, and replication of successful Citizen Observatory experiences

Citizen Observatories

Focusing on mobility, air quality and healthy living, citizens are inspired to observe and co-create their cities by sensing their urban environments and by developing Citizen Observatories towards complementing, validating and enriching the exiting information in authoritative data held by the public administrations and public agencies. This enhanced and evidence-based information will be used for smart urban governance including policy evaluation, policymaking and decision-making.

The envisioned campaigns are to be deployed and fully demonstrated in four pilot engagements in selected European cities and regions including: Bristol (the United Kingdom), Copenhagen (Denmark), Turano – Gerace (Italy) and the region of North Brabant (the Netherlands). These use cases aim to highlight the need for smart city governance by promoting citizen engagement, co-creation, gathering new data which will complement existing datasets and evidence-based decision and policy-making.

Bristol
United Kingdom
Copenhagen
Denmark
North Brabant
The Netherlands
turano-gerace picture
Turano-Gerace
Italy

Bespoke tools for environmental monitoring

GREENGAGE will facilitate the multidisciplinary Citizen Observatories campaigns empowering citizen observers with bespoke tools for environmental monitoring – a GREENGAGE toolbox of technologies. This “quiver” of technologies will consist of existing software and hardware tools of consortium partners promoting data observation, data visualization, information processing and training.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 101086530).

This work was co-funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee 10063933, 10062587, 10064231.

This work was co-funded by SERI (State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation) under the funding ID Contract No. 22.00496 REF-131-52014.