Nordic participatory, healthy, and people-centered cities

NordicPATH’s overall objective is to establish a new model for citizens' participation and collaborative planning in the Nordic countries focused on urban air quality and the interlinked challenge of climate change. Our research focuses on strategies to engage citizens in the process of socio-technological change required by planners and designers to provide the built environment and the services that will shape future sustainable cities with a human-centered approach. NordicPATH will investigate how technologies can facilitate processes of collaborative co-design of solutions towards shaping more liveable, healthy, and sustainable cities for everyone. The main research question is therefore if bottom-up processes can be concretely combined with urban planning practice and policy processes in relation to important environmental issues.NordicPATH will develop a participation method based on community activities and identity-establishing tools. This will allow for a new participative planning culture in the Nordic countries that will not just reflect the democracy that the Nordic countries represent in the world, but also the progress towards deliberative democracy, involving and shaping important local and global issues (such as air quality) together with citizens’ input on decisions. Participation in improving urban air quality is the NordicPATH strategy towards a liveable, resilient and smart urban environments.

NordicPATH aims at smart and sustainable solutions with a citizen-oriented approach. Technology will not be considered as a goal itself, but as a tool to increase accessibility to different societal groups, to stimulate the circular exchange of knowledge among citizens, public authorities, private sector and scientists and to foster system innovation towards sustainable development. We will apply a co-monitoring system, combining environmental measurements from official monitoring stations and citizens’ own measuring devices. NordicPATH is also promoting more inclusive planning processes, involving citizens in the co-design of solutions to tackle environmental issues together with urban planners, authorities and scientists. We will combine the use of more traditional analogue participation tools as workshops and focus groups with the use of digital tools, in particular, PPGIS (public participation Geographical Information Systems), to ensure a broad range of public involvement.