Session 4B - Citizen engagement and the co-creation of nature-based solutions for sustainable urban development: theories and practices for disruptive approaches

Decontamination of polluted land and creation of an Innovation Hub in Baia Mare ROMANIA

Basically, over the next three years, a total area of 8 hectares of land will become Living Labs. The entire project will involve citizens, entrepreneurs and students who will be able to come up with innovation ideas and will have a specially created space in the city center, an Innovation Hub.

The project partners will help to implement a virtual rewards and payments system, called iLEU, to encourage sustainable development behaviors in the city and to support citizens' involvement in the project, but also to obtain benefits and reductions locally, in the future. The iGIS platform will be used for data collection, a platform that will be able to provide forecasts on the duration of a land decontamination.

The UIA SPIRE project will use non-invasive and plant methods for remediation of heavy metal pollution. At the same time, the project aims to support new economies based on nature at local level, new initiatives in the community and ideas from young people.

Finally, after the concrete results of the project the partners will develop a Masterplan for the Baia Mare Metropolitan Area, which will aim at the recovery and regeneration of the approximately 650 hectares of polluted land.

The national partnership is coordinated by the Municipality of Baia Mare and consists of the following national partners: Urbasofia, Indeco soft, ARIES Transilvania, Baia Mare Metropolitan Area, University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Cluj-Napoca and Green Energy Cluster.

Producers of waste (Sassen, 2004), places of consuming more than production (Parham, 2015), cities are now subject of a social demand for nature (Bourdeau-Lepage & Vidal, 2012), participative democracy (Beierle & Cayford, 2002) and recently more political interest for climate change. 

The problem of the cities comes today from the way in which they produce space, which we approach here under the angle of the sociology of H. Lefebvre: space is a social product, and this space is used as instrument with the thought like with the action. It is, at the same time as a means of production, a means of control thus of domination and power. For Lefebvre, space is thus the product of (daily) practices, strategies, representations, appropriations, even contradictory practices, resulting from groups, from different social positions. For him, the capitalist mode of production produces an urban space that is its own, and that allows its own reproduction. This capitalist space produced by an elite does not sufficiently take into account the climatic and vegetal issues, but it is beginning to change by including citizens more and more in the processes of urban construction (Bally, 2015). 

Citizens are invited to participate through collective gardening (like shared or community gardens) to produce and manage public green spaces (Ernwein, 2019). These citizens initiatives contribute to create new imaginaries about cities with spaces of plants, flowers and vegetables accessible to everyone, in each neighborhood. Street gardens (Bally, 2019), wild herbs emerging from the concrete, flowers on the space between a habitation and the pavement or flowers / vegetables in a trail, managed by residents, also produce new imaginaries : a nature close to the house, in the street, where everyone can garden and benefits from these gardens. Residents choose to cultivate their street and to take care of flowers during the year. They have to make a demand to the municipality, which can dig a hole in the pavement, or legitimate an existant trail. These street gardens are interesting because they grow on public space, without a fence, where everyone can act, even badly, on the flowers. From this perspective, the right to the city take the form of residents participation to their neighborhood landscape.  

We base our analysis on an ethnography over 10 street gardens in Lyon (France). We led multiple observations on collective events, meetings and of other moments, and also 36 interviews with street gardeners and institutional actors on the territory, and we rely on the collection of secondary data such as charts, notes on events, newsletters, for example.  

This presentation aims to show how residents can shape vegetal places through street gardens (which are in part collective gardens), therefore claiming their right to the city (H. Lefebvre, 1968) and how they create new representations on the city, that can influence public policies and create path dependencies, like community and shared gardens did. 

By appropriating a public space on the street, these inhabitants change the way the city is managed and contribute to the generalization of a bottom-up approach: it is the collective appropriation of the city, a reappropriation through daily practices, which can allow a liberation and a change in the mode of production of space (Lefebvre, 1974) and thus develop development solutions that are more in line with nature and the good life in the city.

With profound urban changes foreseen in the implementation of URBiNAT, in Campanhã, Porto, I tried to visually rescue personal narratives, emotions and reflections in this place This presentation is, therefore, a systematization of the steps taken to produce a visual and textually sustained approach and to know how these can engage citizens in the interventions. 

It became inevitable from the outset to develop a speculative visual research, which would capture expanded visions of the concept of sustainability, in search of multiple logics and rationalities. In this sense, care and transformation emerged from the unforeseen, from social, political, economic, philosophical and ecological events that could not have been anticipated. 

Photographically approaching health, education, culture and housing are forms of care that range from the individual to the collective. This work could thus, in a way, be considered an oracle, a deliberate attempt to produce new issues surrounding URBiNAT’s principles. To this end, visual anthropology has provided the necessary analytical tools to research relative truths, concepts and worldviews.

In this presentation, a set of recommendations, principles, curiosities, anecdotes and other stories are told to illustrate what can be characterized as ethnographic work and its peculiarities.

In this process, I intended to identify the constraints and possibilities surrounding the concept of sustainability. While it is true that any attempt at generalization is a permanent difficulty in qualitative studies, the images and voices present here have crossed the line that unites the intimate with the political.

It was intended, therefore, to move towards greater participation and co-production of knowledge with the approached people, hence engaging them in the upcoming project. In this way, and in this context, the objective was to recognize and, above all, promote the articulation of personal experiences with public policies, private initiatives and other locally implemented projects.

Participation in urban planning

Participation; the action of taking part in something.

The participatory approach in the public planning domain has become institutionalized as a method of good planning practice as opposed to the rational hierarchical comprehensive approach. In the public sphere, especially in community planning, democratic principles and public participation have become increasingly accepted as means for balancing and rationalizing multiple interests and preferences. The end of participation is to forge consensus among interested parties, including planners, decision-makers, citizen groups and advocacy groups, outside the traditional decision-making setup. Participation is thus viewed as a community action that is meant to augment the institutionalized democratic processes.(Kaza,Niki,2006,P256). 

Healthy city theories

After the Industrial Revolution, the world's urban population increased This led to the emergence and formation of millions of cities in the area Most of thispopulation was made up of immigrant and poor villagers They formed to move to cities in search of work. Concerns arising from this phenomenon led developed countries, especially after World War II, to take measures to resolve or contain this crisis. Due to these problems, theories about the preservation of the urban environment were presented, which led to the emergence of various cities in the industrialized countries and then in developing countries(Ziari and Janbaba Nejad,2009,15).

Co-Selection of NBS

The NBS co-selection workshop was held with the participation of a group of local activists, in which 12 local activists participated. Among the NBS that received the most votes:

1- School of Entrepreneurship

2- Equipping vacant lot

3- Growing mushrooms and hydroponic saffron

Case 1 was selected as the first priority with the highest number of votes and Cases 2 and 3 with the same number of votes were selected as the second priority.
Conclusion
Partnership and neighborhood are two interrelated elements. The characteristics of a healthy city arise from the characteristics that can be achieved with neighborhood and participation. Due to the high number of economic and social problems in families living in deprived neighborhoods, less attention is paid to the living environment, However, familiarizing the residents of such neighborhoods with the good living conditions and their right to their place of residence increases their attention to the living environment and the quality level of such neighborhoods also improves with the participation of the residents themselves. By pursuing URBiNAT project In Khorramabad the residents' attention to their living environment and sense of social responsibility increased. It is expected that with the implementation of several NBS proposed by residents, their level of trust and participation and consequently the quality of their living environment will increase.

References

1. Kaza,Nikhil,2006 ,Planning theory; tyranny of median and costly consent : a reflection on the justification or participatory urban planning process, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. 

2. Ziari, Keramatullah and  Janbaba Nejad, Mohammad Hussein,2009, Healthy city views and theories. Shahrdariha monthly,V9 No 95.