Scientific Publications
Let’s Do It Online?! Challenges and Lessons for Inclusive Virtual Participation
16.05.2022
In this paper, it is aimed to shed light on the potentials and trade-offs in shifting to online participation and who gets to participate under digital Participatory Action Research (PAR) circumstances. The authors used a mixed-methods approach to evaluate the planning progress and the transition to working online in the six cities during the first wave of the pandemic. The study identifies critical implications of COVID-19 on participatory planning processes, the challenges for online participation, and the effectiveness of measures applied to tackle those challenges. The transition to online participatory planning described in this paper emphasizes organizational rather than technical remedies. While the planning progress in all cities was delayed, some faced significant challenges in the transition to online due to the lack of technical or community capacities. This was fostered through the diverse and new realities of the stakeholders ranging from meeting existential needs to adapting to alternative forms of working and caring. The reflections in this paper offer learnings from the disruptions caused by COVID-19 to better understand how participatory planning processes can be managed online along the lines of equity, access, and participation. The findings demonstrate how participatory processes in the ongoing crisis can be maintained, with relevance to future waves of this and other pandemics.
Monitoring people’s motivations to participate in an urban neighbourhood and community garden
2022
Public health science has clearly documented that participation in voluntary work and social inclusion can contribute to increased quality of life. In 2020, two master’s students at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) investigated the significance of Linderud neighbourhood and community garden (site of the EdiCitNet Living Lab in Oslo) for the health and quality of life of its users. They gained insight into various motivating factors that the participants themselves defined as significant for their involvement in the garden.
Decentralized water reuse in cities is a prominent alternative to mainstream top-down models for urban water treatment, which are based on centralized, linear dynamics of resource management. In this sense, Nature-based Solutions (“green” technologies) coupled with advanced technologies (“grey” technologies) constitute a promising approach for fomenting onsite water treatment and reuse in cities, while also providing multiple co-benefits. This article puts forward a conceptual advancement by providing a better understanding of coupled “green-grey”/“grey-green” technologies (CGGT).
Nature-based solutions in the urban context: terminology, classification and scoring for urban challenges and ecosystem services
The concept of Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) has emerged to foster sustainable development by addressing social, economic, and environmental urban challenges. However, there is still a considerable lack of agreement on the conceptualization of NBS, especially concerning typologies, nomenclature, and performance assessments in terms of ecosystem services (ES) and urban challenges (UC). Therefore, this article consolidates the knowledge from 4 European projects to set a path for a common understanding of NBS and thus, facilitate their mainstreaming.
Evaluating the impact of nature-based solutions: A handbook for practitioners
04.05.2021
This Handbook aims to provide decision-makers with a comprehensive NBS impact assessment framework, and a robust set of indicators and methodologies to assess impacts of nature-based solutions across 12 societal challenge areas. Indicators have been developed collaboratively by representatives of 17 individual EU-funded NBS projects and collaborating institutions, as part of the European Taskforce for NBS Impact Assessment. They reflect the state of the art in current scientific research on impacts of nature-based solutions and valid and standardized methods of assessment, as well as the state of play in urban implementation of evaluation frameworks.
Beetles in an urban community garden can indicate global warming
2021
Beetles were surveyed using pitfall traps in the EdiCitNet Living Lab in Andernach, Germany.
Two years of data revealed a beetle fauna characteristic of sandy, warm and dry habitats. Sporadic findings include species typical for the Mediterranean
Fostering edible cities and landscapes with mundraub
November 2018
This handbook offers different possiblities for you to get involved in rediscovering the city and thinking it further, giving you the chance to use and spread it in the context of your own activity, impacting positively municipalities and cities, organisations, initiatives and associations dedicated to edible city solutions, companies, schools, youth clubs and individuals.
