Context
City Conferences were established in response to a recognised need within the municipality to strengthen the connection between citizens and local government. The initiative was formed as a result of an identified absence of structured and continuous dialogue among the municipality, experts, businesses, and civil society, which is one of the key governance challenges. The project aims to address several issues within the local community, including low levels of trust in public institutions, limited opportunities for meaningful citizen participation in decision-making, and fragmentation among key urban stakeholders. By creating a structured platform for dialogue, the City Conferences project is a chance to foster collaboration and transparency, in addition to gathering and implementing data provided in sessions in a meaningful way. In doing so, the initiative contributes to strengthening participatory democracy and social cohesion, while supporting the collective identification of solutions to complex urban challenges such as quality of life, sustainable development, and the city’s long-term strategic direction.
Objectives
A central objective of the project is to enable a chance for active participation of residents in the policymaking process. City Conferences offer more inclusive and transparent decision-making and policymaking, ensuring that diverse perspectives are heard and potentially directly incorporated into the development of local policies. Therefore, they help with recognising and prioritising the issues that residents deem most important, as well as enabling direct data and insight gathering from the residents who experience those issues. In addition, this gives municipalities a chance to have a direct insight into challenges citizens face and potential solutions. The project aims to address a variety of people by simultaneously involving citizens, experts, entrepreneurs, public institutions, and civil society, bringing them all together in joint working groups. Through direct invitations, personal outreach, and open public calls, the project also involves individuals who rarely participate in formal participatory processes, enabling equal and safe participation, and offering a chance for all the voices to be heard. A methodologically guided process ensures that collected ideas do not remain at the level of discussion but are systematically translated into guidelines and concrete actions implemented by the city administration.
Implementation
City Conferences were established by the newly elected city administration in 2022 when a need for a collaborative process between municipal administration, external experts, and city residents was recognised. The concept of city conferences was developed through cooperation between the core municipal administration, the Director of the City Administration, the Mayor’s advisor, and three external collaborators. Their role included designing the concept, defining thematic focus, and external collaborators/speaker selection for the first event. A core team consisting of municipal staff is solely responsible for organisation, logistics, and event planning as part of their work responsibilities, whereas the topics and content of participatory workshops are established in tandem with municipality and external experts. An integrated approach to address urban challenges was used by tackling environmental, economic, and social dimensions, embedded in a quadruple helix model. Data was gathered with the help of several digital technologies (Google forms) and virtual participation platforms (Slido), and analysed and evaluated (Excel, Cloud-shared documents for outcomes). Financially, the project evolved from being solely financed from municipal funds at first to being partially financed with EU funding at the last conference.