Citizen and Stakeholder Engagement
Empowering Communities through Participation and Engagement
The MI-TRAP project is deeply committed to fostering citizen participation and engagement, recognising the invaluable role of citizens in contributing to environmental awareness, innovation, and policy-making. In this light, a cornerstone of our approach is the integration of Citizen Science for air quality across Europe. According to the EU-Citizens Science definition, Citizen Science can be any activity that involves the public in scientific research and thus has the potential to bring together science, policymakers, and society as a whole in an impactful way. MI-TRAP project partners actively collaborate with renowned associations in the field such as the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA), and engage in various EU projects like Citizen Science COST Action, CSA We Observe, and CSA EU-Citizen Science. To this end, the MI-TRAP will leverage upon existing knowledge coming from these collaborations and advance them to propose targeted citizen science activities that will empower and mobilize local communities.
Harmony Between Nature and Urban Life
The MI-TRAP vision brings to the front the need for sustainable societal and political impacts in tracking air pollution effects. MI-TRAP leverages Citizen Observatories (COs) principles and methodological tools to propose a horizontal Citizen Science framework that will identify relevant topics affecting citizens’ daily lives such as air quality and noise pollution in the project’s different sites, aspiring for an impactful contribution to the MI-TRAP project results. Citizen Observatories can be considered specialized infrastructures that monitor the urban environment in an interactive fashion. These initiatives, usually, operate at a local level with a long-term perspective, delivering a wealth of data that comes directly from the citizens and can complement authoritative, traditional in-situ observation networks. The MI-TRAP Citizen Observatory will support the implementation of a cross-country online survey aimed to gather citizens’ perspectives when it comes to their cognitive and mental health and correlate them with air pollution concentrations. This is how we aim to bring bottom-up knowledge into meeting EU Zero-pollution targets and informing the EU Urban Agenda.
Stakeholder Engagement and Living Labs: Co-Creating Real-World Solutions
All MI-TRAP partners are active collaborators in the alignment of the project results to wider practices for air pollution mitigation ensuring further the sustainability of the project outputs. Stakeholder identification and engagement is a key activity within the project realized through the employment of the Living Lab methodology, a widely acknowledged approach for supporting communities, cities, and regions in their transition towards a more resilient and sustainable future based on open and inclusive innovation. Living Labs are real-life test environments fostering co-creation and open innovation among citizens, government, industry, and academia, creating joint-value for the stakeholders involved. With the active involvement of Amaranthus Social Cooperative, the MI-TRAP project implements an International Living Lab consisting of different co-creation activities such as participatory workshops. Through this, different stakeholders will collaborate to understand MI-TRAP objectives, analyze the multi-level perspective of air-pollution, and envision transformative pathways towards improving air quality. The ILL will include stakeholders from all pilot sites and a multiplicity of relevant sectors, embracing a systematic co-creation approach.
Fostering Innovation
We embrace the novelty of the Living Lab approach by placing citizens and users at the core of the entire life cycle, supporting an inclusive and impactful collaborative environment. At MI-TRAP, citizen engagement and co-creation are not just strategies; they are the heart of our mission, empowering communities to actively participate in the realization of policy initiatives but also ensuring giving back to the communities involved. MI-TRAP citizen and stakeholder engagement activities will actively inform the MI-TRAP toolbox, a toolkit built to assist policymakers, planners, and community organizers in identifying measures to improve air quality, develop more efficient emissions and noise reduction plans, specifically targeting transport emissions and enable future innovative interventions at the urban scale. Its output will be communicated in the Living-in.EU initiative to further support more innovative use of technologies for addressing environmental challenges at the local level.
MI-TRAP approach connects citizens’ needs and desires for improved Public Health and Well-being to acknowledge climate change mitigation and adaptation pathways such as Nature-based Solutions (NbSs). NbSs are novel interventions that bring diverse and natural features and processes into cities, landscapes and seascapes through place-making. Aiming to address multiple concerns, they support ecosystem resilience through locally adapted, resource-efficient and systemic interventions in the urban fabric. Under the coordination of Politecnico Milano, MI-TRAP will leverage upon participatory processes and stakeholder exchange to demonstrate NbSs in 6 sites and 4 European cities (Athens-Piraeus, Milan, Lisbon, Gladsaxe-Copenhagen). In such a way, it will assess NbSs impact for Public Health and Well-being, air quality and noise metrics, as well as, social and environmental impacts.
