In mid-May, another meeting of the EUARENAS project consortium took place, this time in Berlin, involving practitioners and experts in participation and deliberation (Community of Practice) who collaborate with us, as well as local guests invited to participate in workshops under the theme “Democracy Action Day.”

The first part of the meeting began with short speeches by representatives of the CoP group. Katarzyna Dyzio from the City of Łódź discussed locally applied practices of engaging residents in the co-creation process of the city. Brett Hennig, the co-founder of the Sortition Foundation, addressed issues related to the selection of representative groups of residents, known as minipublics, in deliberation processes. Mikko Rask from the University of Helsinki spoke about methods of measuring the quality and effects of participation. Next, Wojciech Ufel (SWPS) and Krisztina Keresztély (CRN), leaders of Work Packages 1 (Theory) and 4 (Piloting), presented excerpts from the documents being developed by their teams for discussion – the Handbook of Deliberative Facilitation and the evaluation report on pilot activities undertaken in Gdańsk, Reggio Emilia, and Võru.

In the further part of the meeting, Dr. Hayley Throwbridge (PVM) led workshops on the vision of the future of democracy and participatory spaces in European cities, during which our ideas materialized in collectively built LEGO structures. These findings, along with other research results from WP5 (Foresight), will soon be included in a report prepared by our partners at PVM.

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Photos: EUARENAS Consortium