Overview

According to a UN study (2015), it is estimated that 68% of the world’s population will be urban by 2050. This means that the decisions to be made for this not so distant future will be made from the city, and it is important to ensure that the necessary conditions exist to allow these decisions to be made in a sustainable manner, and to ensure that these conditions are geared towards this, there must be citizen participation. Consensus among all is key if we want to achieve a sustainable city.

The challenge behind this comes from how to link the various agents so that meaningful and efficient collaborative alliances can be created, for example between citizens and public entities. Unfortunately, nowadays there is so much information and a whole framework of technical knowledge on the subject that it is difficult to transfer it in a more understandable way to the citizens.

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How could we educate citizens who do not know the ways to participate in their city? was the way I began to formulate the starting challenge to find solutions to help build a more sustainable city.

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Of course, I had to ask myself, what exactly does citizen participation mean, in order to cross off the long list of questions. The topic was initially very broad to explore, so I needed to focus on a more precise approach and one thing that helped me identify it was to make a map of citizen participation, in which a colleague and I spun the information to identify areas of opportunity.

After establishing the starting point, I designed the research process to get a close look at the dynamics that make up citizen participation and its challenges in putting it into practice.

I conducted several context interviews with young people (about 20 belonging to universities in Bilbao) and with experts (5 in total) in the field of citizen participation. I also had the opportunity to have two experiences closely related to citizen participation: one of them by attending an open forum on security issues in the town of Otxarkoaga in Bilbao and the other by joining a participation process of the Basque Youth Council (EGK).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2L7ljZHt2A

Key findings and insights

From the interviews, I was able to identify on which group of citizens I should focus the challenge. The idea of interviewing young people on the one hand and experts in the field on the other, helped me to contrast needs, barriers and also to discard hypotheses that arose during the research, such as how much do young people know about participation and if they know the different ways of participating in their environment?