MULTIGINATION - Multiplicative imagination of citizens and stakeholders towards the 15 minutes City
Business, Management and Services
The 15-minute city is an urban planning concept aimed at creating neighborhoods where residents have access to all essential amenities and services within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. This approach promotes proximity between home, work, shops, schools and green spaces, reducing car dependency, carbon emissions and travel times. By encouraging an active and sustainable local life, 15-minute cities aspire to improve quality of life, social cohesion and urban resilience.
In this context, the Multiplicative imagination of citizens and stakeholders towards the 15 minutes City (MULTIGINATION) project proposes an innovative process and tools (including visualization, marketplace of innovative solutions, voting and a crowdfunding platform) to enhance the multiplicative imagination of public spaces and streets, leading to urban interventions for sustainability. The project aims to establish a replicable movement for continuous urban improvements that involve diverse stakeholders.
Car parking spaces, public transport stops and mobility hubs, waste and reuse collection containers, package exchange stations, decentralised public offices are reshaped in the use-cases (embedding the 15mC goals) of a bottom-up process (involving experts, citizens, private companies, researchers, NGOs and city authorities).
Covering from visualisation to evaluation, funding and execution, this process is codified for transferability. Basic and advanced services are co-designed in Living Labs and localised in critical areas by a participatory process embedding a proven open-access visualisation tool of the built and non-built environment, multiplied by a marketplace of innovative solutions and a crowdfunding platform.
Citizens’ proposals can be budgeted. The cities select what to implement, keeping into account this "participatory urbanism" and all constraints (zero emission and other goals, laws, stakeholder interests, ownership rights, etc.). Cities can co-finance the investment, look for private investors, draw on crowdfunding campaigns and use part of the Call funds. In other terms, we are setting up a replicable movement of constant improvements of the urban landscape by fostering the multiplicative involvement of all actors.
This project is funded as part of the Driving Urban Transitions Partnership (DUT), a programme co-funded by the European Union that aims to accelerate the transition to more sustainable, resilient and inclusive cities in Europe. It brings together researchers from HEG-VS, ZHAW, Tampere University of Applied Sciences (Finland) and Coventry University (UK), as well as public authorities in Switzerland (City of Winterthur, Canton of Geneva), Italy, Belgium, Spain, Finland and Turkey.