“How can successful public participation for a sustainable city be organized?” Last Friday, within the framework of COP23, EADI, BSP and EUROSOLAR invited interested passionate individuals from civil society, politics and academia to discuss existing problems and design solutions in the workshop “Participation in sustainable cities – locally and globally”.
While the 23rd World Climate Conferenceis taking place in Bonn, local organizations are getting engaged. EADI, BSP and EUROSOLAR did not want to offer lectures, but enter into dialogue. Within the Workshop focusing on crosscutting issues like energy, mobility and education, participants were asked to bring best practice examples to the discussion. Using these, they could figure out which barriers are there for citizen participation and how can successes be made globally applicable. Eventually, the participants formulated visions of how sustainable cities should be designed and what kind of actions would therefore be required from politics, economy and science.
Prior to the workshop, Prof. Dr. Wiltrud Terlau, Founding Director of International Centre for Sustainable Development – IZNE, opened this COP23 special event with her keynote: “The sustainable design of the city should be the goal of all who live there”, Terlau stated. “And sustainable stakeholders need to be included in decision-making when it comes to sustainable living, since they are the ones who are living it.”
Over the day, three workshop groups on energy, mobility and education identified their answers to the key questions and came to an agreement on their common vision paper: “We live in an era of rapid and fundamental transformations, constantly creating new challenges. The way these transformations and challenges are countered will be decisive for the future of humankind and the future of our global and local communities”, it says in the preamble and further: “The challenge is to find the right means to reach these goals and make them applicable to everyday life. We believe that participation and agency of all citizens is crucial for successful transformation that benefits all – for people, planet, prosperity and peace – both locally and globally.”
The paper will be uploaded to the COP23 Document server and is available as open document for further discussions at the Bonn Sustainability Portal: http://bit.ly/2hsb3RU
The workshop was organized with financial assistance by the City of Bonn.