With a large part of the built environment privately owned in many European cities, citizen engagement is crucial for the success of sustainability initiatives in urban areas. The use of digital platforms and tools can support this process, given their potential to enable remote participation, reach a large number of citizens, and enhance governance transparency. However, many digital platforms for citizen engagement in sustainability action remain underutilised. This study adopts a user-centric perspective to analyse the interface design of over ten digital platforms and identify design elements that hinder or foster engagement. Our analysis highlights four main interface issues: disconnection between scientific data and personal experience, complex navigation, information overload, and limited opportunities for action. To overcome these limitations, we developed a set of design guidelines addressing four themes: Awareness and framing, Individual and collective action, Effective use of data, and Navigation and visuals. We implemented these guidelines in two prototypes, focusing on heat waves and biodiversity loss in urban areas. The prototypes were tested in workshop settings with positive feedback from participants, corroborating the importance of citizen-centric interface design in ensuring effective citizen engagement.

This presentation explores the concept of diversity as a defining characteristic of cities and suggests that urban spaces tend to undergo cycles of growth and diversification. The research draws on the work of Jane Jacobs, which is expanded into a fully reproducible framework to study urban diversity. As part of our present conference contribution, we discuss our method for quantifying urban diversity and present a case study of the historic quarter Sassi in Matera, Italy, to illustrate how cities naturally evolve through cycles of growth and diversification. Particular interest is given to the role of tourism as part of this process, and a comparison is made with Amsterdam. The research findings show that, since the 1980s, Sassi has become more diverse, in part due to tourism-related activities. However, the rapid expansion of the hotel industry has led to concerns about the loss of diversity in the case of further expansion. We use diversity maps to forecast the potential impact of further hotel expansion on urban diversity, highlighting the delicate balance between growth and diversity in cities. The case of Sassi is compared with a similar analysis in Amsterdam. The contribution relates to the topic “Blueprint for messy cities” because planners and politicians converged to evacuate Sassi in the 1950s, believing it was too much of a 'mess'. Our approach is designed to reveal the qualities that this 'mess' comes with.

Cities are an increasingly important place for experiments connecting climate action with challenges around food, energy, biodiversity and social justice. The European Commission promotes nature-based solutions (NBS) as innovative strategy for urban sustainable transformations, balancing environmental and socio-economic outcomes of climate and biodiversity actions. However, NBS have been criticised for reproducing power-imbalances and producing negative justice impacts, including gentrification and exclusion of marginalized groups. Previous studies show that quality and structure of NBS governance processes are crucial for just transformation processes (Toxopeus et al., 2020). To enhance distributional, procedural and recognition justice, hybrid or multi-level governance processes have been suggested, aiming to balance top-down decision making with bottom-up perspectives, to foster cross-scale interactions between places and practices, recognize plural socio-cultural values of nature and use different modes of knowledge co-production to achieve outcome-oriented and process goal. Based on case studies in three major European cities, we explore whether and how hybrid governance approaches, such as mosaic governance, may contribute to sustainable and just cities through fostering long-term collaborations between local governments, local communities, and grassroots initiatives in the co-development and co-management of NBS. Based on previous studies into urban governance, empowerment of local communities, and environmental justice, we investigate six possible pathways for mosaic governance to increase the environmental justice impacts of NBS in cities: greening the neighbourhood, diversifying values and practices, empowering people, bridging across communities, linking to institutions, and scaling inclusive discourses and practices. Despite the diversity of environmental justice outcomes across our empirical cases, analysis suggests that mosaic governance particularly contributes to recognition justice through diversifying NBS practices in alignment with community values and aspirations. Moreover, especially in marginalised communities, collaborations between civil society and local governments holds much potential to advance social justice by enabling empowering, bridging, and linking pathways across diverse communities and NBS. However, contributions to distributional and procedural justice are limited, also because the wider context of NBS policies, planning and management is hardly impacted by civil society actions. To advance our understanding of justice impacts of NBS and urban transformations, we suggest to look beyond distributional, procedural and recognition justice, and develop a wider framing of justice in the development and implementation of NBS, sensitive to social, cultural, economic and political inequities as well as to possible pathways to enhance not only environmental but also social justice.