The research

With this Living Lab we aimed to find new ways to involve citizens in quay wall renovations. On this page, you can find information about the background and the process of the Living Lab.

GOAL

The goal for this Living Lab was to find innovative ways in which the municipality of Amsterdam can better involve residents in quay wall renovations. Better involving quay wall residents requires the municipality of Amsterdam to understand these residents and to co-create with them. During this Living Lab, we therefore tried to create mutual understanding between the municipality of Amsterdam and the quay wall residents.

How?

During the first phase of our Living Lab, we interviewed civil servants from the municipality and quay wall residents. From these interviews, we noticed that frustration, from the side of the residents, was mostly raised when there was no understanding of the complexity of the project. Besides, we saw that residents were not satisfied with the current level of citizen involvement. Therefore, we designed two sessions focused on tackling these problems.

session 1

The goal of the first session was to get to know each other and develop more understanding between the participants. Therefore, during this session, a stakeholder game was played. Everyone had to play a certain role within one of the three different groups: the civil servants from the municipality, the quay wall residents and the external parties.

During the game, a renovation process of a quay wall was simulated. By bringing in different types of news flashes, the renovation became increasingly more complicated. The game asked what the different groups thought of the passing news items. Through the game, the civil servants from the municipality saw that for citizens it is a complicated process and therefore these residents need to be involved in other ways to make it understandable. In addition, quay wall residents could see how complex a quay wall renovation is for the municipality of Amsterdam and what kind of decisions the civil servants have to make during a quay wall renovation.

session 2

The goal of the second session was to find new creative ways to involve citizens in the renovation of their quay wall. For this session, a brainstorming game was set up, in which different methods to involve residents in quay wall renovations were discussed. To do this, we first discussed statements about citizen involvement with the whole group. Then the participants had to come up with a solution to best involve residents in that particular situation, in smaller groups.

Based on the two sessions, various recommendations were drawn up, which can be found in the section Advice.