Using the DigiTwin for citizen engagement

Igniting engagement in neighborhoods
Urban Living Lab Breda (ULLB) is a multistakeholder collaboration of active citizens, companies, societal organisations and the municipality in Breda. Its aim is to support citizens in developing their voice in the governance of their living environment. ULLB organises itself in theme-based Communities (e.g. Inclusive society) and in Samenwerkplaatsen (SWP), place-based spaces for collaboration. 

SWP Hoge Vucht focuses on a neighborhood of 15.000 inhabitants in the north-east part of the city. It is a diverse neighborhood with relatively significant numbers of social housing, people with low incomes, low levels of education, and limited life expectancy. The neighborhood also functions as a landing-place for many newcomers with non-Western backgrounds. At the institutional level, the neighborhood is assessed as being vulnerable.

For two years now, SWP is engaging citizens around neighborhood issues. The citizens value their neighborhood, though they also see substantial space for improvements. Inspired by the bottom-up ‘Asset and Strength Based Community Development approach’ of SWP, the inhabitants identified four priorities: mobility (safety), public space, housing and attractive community spaces. 

Dynamic visualisations to enhance citizens engagement (DVECE)
The DVECE project tests the application of dynamic visualizations to enhance citizens’ engagement in the mobility context. Through ideation, co-creation and validation/evaluation workshops within three living labs (Breda, Thessaloniki and Helsinki), DVECE collects, prioritizes and matches mobility needs, set by different groups of vulnerable users in a neighborhood, with policy plans and real-time data. BUas is leading a task dedicated to DigitTwin data collection, matchmaking with citizens driven information and generating dynamic visualizations for citizens engagement. 

DigiTwins are institutional tools for policy development. They can be used as neighborhood focused multi-layered presentations of available data on socio-economic positions, gender, ethnicity, religion, crime, housing and so forth. It is also possible to visualise citizen experiences, worries and ideas dynamically by translating these into 3D representations using pictures and other dynamic GPS-location data. Can the DigiTwin help to enhance engagement of citizens in the mobility context and the broader urban policy development? Can the DigiTwin act as a ‘boundary object’, enabling interactions between multiple stakeholders? ‘Such interactions become necessary to negotiate themes of overlap that “exist at the intersection of two (or more) disparate social worlds ... ” (Von Wirth, Frantzeskaki, Loorbach, 2020). 

The DVECE project is supported by EIT Urban Mobility, an initiative of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union (eiturbanmobility.eu).

Play, create, and tell stories to explore what gives life
SWP organises in the DVECE project workshops with inhabitants with diverse backgrounds. 

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