Eutropian colleagues from our Rome and Budapest offices travelled to Reggio Emilia earlier this month to participate in the 4th workshop of the EUARENAS project (2nd in-person meeting). The Municipality of Reggio Emilia is one of the partners in the project and they were kind enough to host this event in their beautiful city. 

The event consisted of a 2-day project meeting, a 1-day conference, the Urban Climate Justice Day, and a 1-day field visit to a few of Reggio Emilia’s pilot participatory project sites. 

Eutropian is mostly involved with work packages 3 and 4 of the EUARENAS project, looking at case studies of deliberative democracy tools a good practices and helping the development of pilot participatory projects, respectively. As part of WP4 we will be creating a Participatory Toolbox to help urban practitioners navigate the abundantly available good practices and tools of citizen participation to help them develop and carry out participatory processes in urban settings. The 2-day project meeting provided a great opportunity for us to build upon the initial concept and methodology of our Toolbox with the help of project partners. Giovanni Pagano and Lukács Hayes, our junior collaborators from Rome and Budapest, delivered a presentation on the current state of the Toolbox and we then facilitated workshops to capture the feedback and suggestions for further refinement from partners.  

We also contributed to the Urban Climate Justice Day by participating in a panel of cities looking at ways in which challenges of climate change and climate justice can be addressed by means of participation and citizen inclusion. Our role was to help the audience follow the discussion by visualising what was said in real-time on a MIRO board. Daniela Patti then delivered concluding remarks, summarizing the discussion and pointing out ways in which cities can be more effective in their fight against climate change by better incorporating participatory mechanisms and processes into urban policymaking.