CEMR, the Council of European Municipalities and Regions, together with the EU-funded project Smarticipate, organised on 29 May 2018 a workshop on Digital transition meets participatory governance.
The key issues tackled during the workshop were:
Smarticipate is an EU-funded project which aims at giving citizens access to data about their city in an easy to understand way, enabling them to better support the decision-making process. To do so, it is developing a platform which is being trialled in three major European cities: London, Rome, and Hamburg. Click here to find out more about each city’s vision.
During the workshop, the three cities, plus Vienna, presented their current initiatives on citizens' engagement in smart cities. Vienna, notably showcased its "Wien gibt Raum" (Vienna gives space, more information here) project, which aims at providing a digital service to support citizens/businesses initiatives. This project doesn't imply much technological support, and rather use some ICT tools to support the provision of public services. Hamburg has implementing digital touch screens, which help citizens engage in urban planning decisions. The initative works both online and offline, as the key to success lies in the combination of both approaches. Such initiatives must always aim at bringing people together, recalled Hamburg's representative. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London is using the smarticipate platform to reach the citizens who usually do not easily engage. Public consultations indeed attract who we can call the usual suspects, while the other groups of the population rarely participate, or if they do, often too late in the process.
These local initiatives are supported by a wide range of EU policies and programmes, such as the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities, the JPI Urban Agenda, the Urban Agenda for the EU's Digital Transition partnership, and recent initatives from the European Commission such as the Tallinn eGovernement declaration and the on-going co-creation initiative towards a label for citizens-centric cities.
More information can be found here.