We Make the City. The City Makes Us. - The Local Engagement Booster

Many locals are enthusiastic in contributing to the energy transition/ climate change but find themselves lost in the execution of action. At the same time, the city of Düsseldorf organises a bunch of local programmes/ initiatives on climate change/ energy transition/ sustainability. So apparently there is a gap where those two actors do not find each other. 

And that is where this project by the Dusseldorf Hub steps in: THE LOCAL CIVIC ENGAGEMENT BOOSTER - We make the city. The city makes us.

The leading questions of this project are: 

• How are the global issues reflected within our local community?


• What are the tangible actions that citizens can do that go beyond “individual changes” (eating less meat, cycling, …) but initiate a systematic change? 

The focus is on increasing impact by involving more citizens by improving the impact and outreach of existing sustainability projects.

This can only be done by investigating what the problem is. The evaluation of public participation can help to find out what worked and what did not work; uncover unexpected results; apply what has been learned to improve the future practice of participation activities; know whether public participation actually contributes to improved decision-making, and assess whether the exercise was cost-effective in terms of time and resources. And all this gets an interesting touch in the context of COVID-19.

🎯 Goal? Close the gap between locals that want to get engaged but don’t know how and the municipality initiatives that look for local engagement but find it lacking. Increase co-creation and community engagement. 

🛠 How? Survey with both citizens and organisers of initiatives, understand the problem, find best practices and implement in 2 pilot projects with ongoing initiatives from the city. 

👊🏼 Impact? More outreach & participation of the green citizen awareness/ involvement programmes.