Zoekresultaten

Enhancing the Inclusivity and Effectiveness of European Climate Action through Lessons from Participatory Action Research with Activist Groups

The climate crisis is an urgent and complex global challenge, requiring transformative action from diverse stakeholders, including governments, civil society, and grassroots movements. Conventional top-down approaches to climate governance have proven insufficient (e.g. UNFCCC, COP events), necessitating a shift towards more inclusive and polycentric models that incorporate the perspectives and needs of diverse communities (Bliznetskaya, 2023; Dorsch & Flachsland, 2017). The independent, multidisciplinary approach of citizen-led activist groups can provide new insights and redefine challenges and opportunities for climate governance and regulation. Despite their important role in developing effective climate action, these citizen-led groups often face significant barriers to decision-making participation, including structural, practical, and legal challenges (Berry et al., 2019; Colli, 2021; Marquardt et al., 2022; Tayler & Schulte, 2019).

Trends in distribution centres and their locations

For a philosophy of technology in China

An IMAGE Case Compilation

Talking and discussing with many partners during the way has brought us to the most original meaning of Teaching as ‘fostering learning’. The present Teaching case is the result of all those discussions and considerations united by the convincement that doing research is an essential part of that just mentioned fostering learning. Besides a Case to work on, the current Teaching Case includes a series of guidelines plus a body of thoughts and considerations to be taken into account when conducting research on places in all their complexity. In the endwe have all agreed on the importance of becoming more knowledgeable and better informed. It all implies a commitment to do so!The MAGE Case illustrated in this Teaching Case compilation has been mainly the product of an already existing interest in learning more about specific areas in our cities, often the areas in which new venues of our universities have been built. Working with partners in real life cases we experienced an increasingly sense of being part of the whole. We stopped calling the companies and institutions we were working with as potential ‘clients’ and started to build on a partnership’s cooperation narrative. Next steps in this trajectory have been to take the time to better establish the implications of seriously adopting this partnership narrative as a way of working together in research and education. In this sense, it has been indispensable to review terms such as co-creation, design thinking or teaching case and to come to grips by incorporating them as concepts in a case glossary.In terms of context, it is relevant to know that the current IMAGE Case as described in these pages has been elaborated in three different editions during the academic years 2020-2021 and 2021-2022. In each edition, we have been working with an international intercity cooperation from and within the cities of (in alphabetical order) Amsterdam, Barcelona, Lisbon, Paris and Vienna. The different schools and faculties are all part of higher education institutions in the cooperating cities and have a location in the focus areas of the case. Our districts and neighborhoods in the partner cities: Amsterdam -Zuidoost-; Barcelona -El Raval-; Lisbon -Carnide-; Paris -La Defènse-; Vienna -St. Marx-. During these two years we have been working together with students coursing different subjects and mostly in the bachelor courses. Lecturers and all kind of local partners have been closely involved in the process of making the case happen. The case description in this compilation shows intentionally the dates of the 3rd edition that took place in the second semester 2021-2022. This last edition helped to improve and re-see the Case after a period of lockdowns because of covid-19 pandemic regulations. Operating between the specific years of 2020-2022 has been an extraordinary experience in the literal sense of the word. The Covid-19 pandemic became an exceptional situation even for online intercity cooperation at a distance. Despite the longer experience built on online working together at a distance with international partners, the truly limitation of offline face-to face meetings at all levels, together with the experiences of being ill and even losing loved ones, has obviously had an impact. In terms of conducting research and collecting first-handdata, the restrictions have been clearly visible as well. Looking at the footage elaborated by the different students’ teams during the first and second edition one sees at once the emptiness of the streets, to name an example. The trigger for the current Case IMAGE Researching the City Mapping Imaginaries was mainly born from the increasing awareness that our look at cities' reputations (and at the reputations of areas within cities) could use a more diverse lens. Without denying the relevance of by now referential iconic places, there is a need to go beyond the already established and towards a new positioning for cities to capture a broader and more substantiated city map-- a map which contributes to seeing beyond the obvious towards the less generally known.This need is urgent. Even before Covid-19 pandemic and the cost of living crisis, many European cities were facing various challenges from mass tourism, to gentrification and decreasing livability in some urban areas. Despite city campaigns, which insist on spreading residents and visitors through all over our cities, cities tend themselves to concentrate attention, and investments, in areas that are already considered referential. But the crux is then, why not extend our view on how reputations and attention is built and really contribute to a more informed city mapping including a larger diversity of areas and centres of interest? Or as some creative entrepreneurs have put it: Instead of everybody aiming to be in a place that is already successful, wouldn't it be better to find new ways of making more places successful? (Bures, 2012b, 2012a)

The Urban Pergola : street furniture of the future?

Due to climate change, rising temperatures lead to more extreme heat stress in urban areas. Last summer, there were poignant images of people looking for shade in cities. Trees are effective measures to provide shade and decrease the perceived temperature. However, trees cannot grow in healthy conditions due to the conflicting interests of the many functions and infrastructure in cities. Also time is a limiting factor; before trees are fully grown and can fulfil its various functions (shade, biodiversity, appearance), it takes not only physical space but also time. Alternative interventions, such as a pergola, can help increase urban resilience by reducing the negative impacts of climate change.Pergolas are known, for example, in more southern Europe cities. However, despite the described promising effects of the pergola in documents to reduce heat stress and provide shade, we barely see these structures in the Dutch public space. We all know the pergola as an esthetical piece in the backyard where it provides shade, privacy and contributes to well-being, but they are not widely used in the public realm.Next to that, there are few or no known preconditions for an urban pergola. The functions that an urban pergola can offer go beyond providing shade. The pergola might help reduce noise and pollution, provide a meeting place in a neighbourhood and support biodiversity. Since space is scarce in cities where many different interests come together, we want to explore the potential contribution of an urban pergola to different problems. Therefore, at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, we have worked on an urban pergola as a real 'boundary object' where we bring education, research, municipalities, and entrepreneurs across disciplines and sectors together to discuss the potential of such an object.For this workshop, we would like to show our first results of this interdisciplinary action research and continue answering the question: how can a pergola fit in the Dutch urban area? Therefore, we would like to explore the functions and forms of the urban pergola with stakeholders, such as municipalities, entrepreneurs, citizens, students, and researchers all from different disciplines. The desired outcome of this workshop is a joint proposal for implementing urban pergolas that can meet the versatile needs of cities and thereby make cities more liveable.

Participatory experimentation with energy law: digging in a ‘regulatory sandbox’ for local energy initiatives in the Netherlands

To facilitate energy transition, in several countries regulators have devised ‘regulatory sandboxes’ to create a participatory experimentation environment for exploring revision of energy law. These sandboxes allow for a two-way regulatory dialogue between an experimenter and an approachable regulator to innovate regulation and enable new socio-technical arrangements. However, these experiments do not take place in a vacuum but need to be formulated and implemented in a multi-actor, polycentric decision-making system through collaboration with the regulator but also energy sector incumbents such as the distribution system operator. We are, therefore, exploring new roles and power division changes in the energy sector as a result of such a regulatory sandbox. We research the Dutch Energy Experimentation Decree (EED) that invites homeowners’ associations and energy cooperatives to propose projects prohibited by extant regulation. In order to localize, democratize and decentralize energy provision, local experimenters can, for instance, organise peer-to-peer supply and determine their own tariffs for energy transport. Theoretically, we rely on Ostrom’s concept of polycentricity to study the dynamics between actors involved in and engaging with the participatory experiments. Empirically, we examine 4 approved EED experiments through interviews and document analysis. Our conclusions focus on the potential and limitations of bottom-up, participatory innovation in a polycentric system. The most important lessons are that a more holistic approach to experimentation, inter-actor alignment, providing more incentives, and expert and financial support would benefit bottom-up participatory innovation.