2022 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"
16th Edition
The consultation workshops are "factories" at the street level to improve the daily life of the residents who live there.
To have a consultation workshop in your street, you must first be solicited by citizens (residents or neighborhood councillors). A letter of invitation is then sent to all the houses on the street and the dead ends or roads directly linked to the functioning of this same street.
On the day of the workshop, arbors, a banner, tables and chairs are set up in the public space on the street concerned to host the consultation workshop. This takes place at the end of the day during the week, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on average (more if necessary) so that people who have a job or children to pick up can participate. A map of the street and the surrounding areas, A0 format, is printed and placed on tables. The inhabitants are then invited to make proposals, observations, give ideas or simply listen to their neighbors in order to improve the functioning of the street. The subjects that emerged were the following:
- Speed
- Parking
- Green spaces in the street
- Pedestrian and bicycle space
- Lighting
- Condition of roads and sidewalks
- Civility and incivility
A report is then made in the same format as the note-taking on the day (plan and post-it) as on the examples at the end of the document. The inhabitants are again invited by mail to propose them the orientation of development taken for their street when the technical services have carried out the necessary studies and costings.
If the residents validate the project (and the elected officials upstream on the budgetary part), then the work will be carried out and a third meeting will be organized a few months later to evaluate the relevance of the work done. For the absent residents, a 4-page document will be specially designed and distributed in each mailbox to explain the whole process and propose an evaluation form. The possibility of modifying the experimental layout of the street should not be ruled out
This format is reproducible for all the streets of the city of Maubeuge (or another municipality), it does not require a specific budget on the organization of the consultation (only the delivery of materials, the realization of invitations and communication materials and the presence of qualified staff and necessary for the organization of consultation workshops). However, the workshops lead to the orientation of the investment expenses of the technical services budget and this must be accepted and taken into account as of the budget preparation of the current year. Pavement markings, street furniture, signage, green spaces and sidewalk renovation are all items of expenditure that can be quickly quantified at the end of a consultation workshop.
The most important thing when organizing a consultation workshop is to follow through and be ready to invest in responding to citizen involvement. Doing a workshop without the certainty of investing in the street is the best way to disavow the community's participatory approaches.
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