The Center for Technology Experience successfully concluded the project b-Part (Building Pervasive Participation), which it had coordinated within the framework of the JPI Urban Europe programme. The aim was to explore the requirements, opportunities, and impacts of implementing pervasive citizen participation concepts in urban governance. To do so, the highly interdisciplinary project consortium organized a living lab in Turku, Finland, where over the duration of five months a novel mobile participation platform was deployed. This application served as one of the official communication channels with the city administration for the duration of the project.
In preparation for this living lab, which presented the core part of the project, requirements for pervasive participation were explored through both literature and related work reviews but also by conducting a series of field studies (most of them in Vienna) as well as work- and walkshops with city officials and urban planners. These preliminary studies informed the design of the final mobile participation application.
The application enabled citizens to propose own ideas and voice concerns related to urban planning and urban life by posting geo-referenced contributions. City officials responded and gave feedback to citizens input but also received relevant insights to current plans themselves. At the end of the Living Lab we counted 780 registered users, 193 posted contributions, 256 comments and 15 missions.
The rich data set gathered through usage logs from the backend, two surveys and several interviews allowed a quite detailed analysis of various aspects impacting public participation, resulting in a comprehensive list of publications to renowned conferences and journals (34 in total; 21 from AIT). These results are described and summarized as recommendations and guidelines for the design of future democratic innovations in the project end report, which is available on request.