Communi­city: technological solutions for marginzalized groups

Written by Eoin Hennekam

What started as an intensive, but relatively ‘modest’ collaboration between Amsterdam, Helsinki and Porto on user-centric technical solutions for different societal challenges, is rapidly becoming a large scale effort to implement user-centric solutions across Europe. With 21 more cities that are joining and with at least 100 pilots on a variety of subjects, CommuniCity is quickly creating blueprints for many social topics in European cities and how to overcome them with technological innovations. Project manager Adeeb Sidani tells all.

CommuniCity is a transformative citizen-centred EU funded project. It contains around 100 innovative Tech Pilots in Europe in urban and peri-urban areas to empower marginalised communities. The team is working together with companies, organisations, associations, tech providers, and citizens to develop solutions to overcome digital and urban challenges.

The project builds on awarded European, as well as national and local, innovation programmes, methods, living labs and platforms. It brings the learnings of these together and devises an inclusive, community-driven, agile innovation, and experimentation model. Read more about CommuniCity.

Piloting the way to user-centric European cities

The set-up for CommuniCity in essence is simple: in collaboration with different stakeholders, including citizens, the team initiates different pilots for technological innovation centred around relevant societal challenges. These challenges are related to themes that have been determined by the team in collaboration with marginalized communities, municipality departments, and associations. Themes for instance are:

  1. Inclusion
  2. Safety
  3. Mobility
  4. Education
  5. Climate
  6. Public spaces
  7. Health
  8. Ageing
  9. Culture
  10. Immigration

Pilots address challenges within one or more of these themes. “For example, on average, elderly people have more difficulty keeping up with the latest digital developments. This connects to two themes: inclusion and ageing. How do we keep this population included in society and how do we overcome the challenge of ageing related to technological advancements?”, says Adeeb.

So far, two rounds of pilots have been completed. The first round being more experimental and internal, to develop the process, toolkit and methodology, and the second one being more external and elaborate, also involving 4 cities in addition to Amsterdam, Helsinki and Porto. With the addition of Prague, Breda, Aarhus and Tallin, around 36 pilots have been executed. The final round, in which 21 cities are joining, will lead CommuniCity to over 100 pilots. This round has started in September, 2024. Porto Digital, one of the entity behind CommuniCity, offers funding for each approved pilot.

Examples of pilots

“Information on the pilots of the first and second round have been published on our website”, Adeeb shares. And some interesting pilots have been executed indeed. Aarhus, for example, is trying to address the challenge of complicated registrations of bank accounts for foreigners.

This pilot project aims to streamline the process of opening bank accounts for the international workforce in the Aarhus municipality. The current inefficient process poses challenges for internationals, citizen services, banks, and companies. By embracing a user-centred, iterative approach rooted in design thinking, Aarhus seeks to identify challenges and create a valuable and impactful solution that simplifies and expedites the process. Read more about this pilot.

Another example is the cross-border pilot with Prague. The main challenge is: How to engage the citizens in participatory planning? As cities become denser and more diverse, it is simultaneously more important and more challenging to ensure inclusive and participatory decision-making. While the advantages of citizen participation are generally accepted, such as improving the quality and sustainability of decisions by building bottom-up support, how to effectively facilitate this remains unclear. What is certain is that existing methods to facilitate citizen engagement pose many barriers, particularly to vulnerable communities. 

This pilot proposes to enhance engagement by bringing it directly to people and into the urban space where change is already happening, including a broader and more diverse people in the urban planning process. As the project aims to engage hard-to-reach citizens and tackle contextual urban planning challenges, right from the ground, it will further validate this and co-create the deployment of Citizen Dialog Kit survey devices in three different European cities. 

A personal favourite

Adeeb shares one of many pilots that stuck in his mind. He refers to a pilot from the first call aimed at elderly people in Porto. “One of the pilots addressed challenges related to health issues and isolation of elderly people. To better understand their health issues and how to manage them, we co-created sensors, that were non-invasive, to track people’s movements in homes. We also used these with people with cerebral palsy. The AI-system learned the patterns of personal movements and was able to spot inaccuracies. This helped health care providers to determine from a distance if there were any possible health issues.”

For these health care providers, an AI-based management system was also created. This system helped them to facilitate more events and activities for these marginalized groups, to help them stay included in society and their community.

The list of pilots has become incredibly extensive. Check out all the pilots from the first two rounds.

Using the lessons learned from Porto

One of CommunitCity’s aims is to share knowledge. All pilots contribute to a more user-centric Europe, and serve as blueprints for other European cities. “We are trying to make toolkits from pilots and co-creation sessions with citizen and other stakeholders. Also on how to involve marginalized groups, because that’s not always easy to do.” Others can learn how to integrate digital or AI solutions for these groups.

“That’s the broader scale. We’re not building for them, but with them. And actually by them. During the implementation we’re constantly co-creating and updating them about the solution. They can then also tell us what else we need to develop or think about. Others can replicate this process and use our or partner’s knowledge. That’s where the strength of collaboration really comes in.”

Interoperability

To further facilitate knowledge sharing, CommuniCity has also created a technical framework, and an open source system where other systems can use each other’s data and methods. “We have different APIs and specifications based on OASC’s MIMs that everyone can use and tailor to their own solutions. Because while methods and systems can be replicated, each city is different and so are citizens. But this at least provides some sort of standard for cities across Europe when they want to implement technological solutions for societal challenges.”

More information

UserCentriCities’ members are more than welcome to join CommuniCity’s efforts. Reach out to the team via their website.