Research projects

Citizen Observatories to complement authoritative measurements within the urban environment

Focusing on mobility, air quality and healthy living, citizens will be inspired to observe and co-create their cities by sensing their urban environments that aim to complement, validate and enrich information in authoritative data held by the public administrations and public agencies. This will be facilitated by engaging with citizens to co-create green initiatives and to develop Citizen Observatories. In GREENGAGE, Citizen Observatories will be a place where pilot cities will co-examine environmental issues from top-down perspective that will provide basis to co-create and co-design innovative solutions to monitor environmental problems at ground level with the help of citizens.

The envisioned campaigns will be deployed and fully demonstrated in four pilot engagements in selected European cities and regions including: Bristol (the United Kingdom), Copenhagen (Denmark), Turano - Gerace (Italy) and the region of Noord Brabant (the Netherlands). These use cases aim to highlight the need for smart city governance by promoting citizen engagement, co-creation, gathering new data which will complement existing datasets and evidence-based decision and policy-making.

Objectives

• Raise citizens’ awareness, interest, and engagement in urban environmental issues

• Provide scientifically-sound and rigorous methods for citizen understanding of environmental data

• Promote and ensure broader acceptance and implementation rates of data collected by citizens in policy- and decision-making

• Promote the co-creation of data solutions for the urban environment

• Establish synergies among partner cities, with other Citizen Observatories and environmental agencies to exchange best practices, ensure transferability, uptake, and replication of successful Citizen Observatory experiences

Bespoke tools for environmental monitoring

GREENGAGE will facilitate the multidisciplinary Citizen Observatories campaigns empowering citizen observers with bespoke tools for environmental monitoring - a GREENGAGE toolbox of technologies. This “quiver” of technologies will consist of existing software and hardware tools of consortium partners promoting data observation, data visualization, information processing and training.

The role of VRVis

VRVis will support the GREENGAGE toolbox with a Visual Analytics dashboard for Data Quality and Structure check, equipped with instantaneous visual feedback that provides a detailed information on data structure and quality metrics (e.g., data gaps, duplicate timestamps). This will further allow for an informed inspection and validation of citizen-collected data, thus increasing the trust in these data for future use in policy-making. Additionally, VRVis will support the planned citizen training campaigns with data literacy competence, equipping citizens with skills to effectively communicate about data and related findings. Lastly, VRVis will lead data and technology harmonization process, jointly delivering an interoperable technology framework with technology project partners.