Valongo: Citizen Participation for a greener Valongo - BiodiverCities Valongo

Aware of the need to protect local biodiversity and to value urban green spaces, the Municipality of Valongo aims to bring citizens closer to nature and involve the local population in these issues, since only through the involvement of citizens can a true transformation be achieved.

The municipality has joined the network of European cities created within the BiodiverCities project of the European Union, an initiative whose main focus was the involvement of citizens in the co-creation of greener cities.  

In this sense, the BiodiverCities Valongo project, developed with the aim of identifying local problems in terms of biodiversity and existing urban green spaces.  Aware that the participation can be a powerful ally to collectively capture, activate and generate innovative solutions, a participatory methodology was adopted aiming to ensure the active involvement of citizens in all phases of the project, which simultaneously was a pedagogical process that contributed to the construction of a common vision of territory. 

The participatory methodology adopted for the implementation of the project was developed in collaboration with the Planning and Public Policies Laboratory (L3P) of Aveiro University, with a view to establishing opportunities for dialogue through informal environments, collecting information on the perspective of citizens, ensuring that participants had a voice in all sessions, providing spaces for the confrontation of ideas and the generation of consensus, making citizens co-responsible in the decision-making process and opening the way for the experimentation of solutions. 

The implementation of the project went through four phases: from the realization of participatory sessions, to debate and identify problems, the co-construction of a diagnosis through the mapping of green spaces, the establishment of priorities and objectives and, finally, the implementation of experimental actions and the creation of a manual of good practices. 

Thus, citizens were involved in a co-creation process, observing a collaborative work between the community and the municipality, from the collective diagnosis phase to the elaboration of proposals and the definition and implementation of experimental actions. 

With BiodiverCities Valongo we intended not only to look at the public space, but above all to develop a project of community involvement in the construction of a biodiversity map for the municipality, as well as empower the community to actively participate in co-creation actions.

• More information: https://www.cm-valongo.pt/participar/biodivercities