Groningen University participates in HORIZON 2020 European Green Deal project with Tangram visualisation

When dealing with environmental issues, participation is not just an option, but an absolute pre-condition for institutional policies and projects’ success. Behavioural changes and transformations in large populations’ lifestyles and expectations are vital during the implementation of the European Green Deal (EGD). However, the current measures are not suitable for actively involving all stakeholders in this effort.

On February 1^st, 2022, the HORIZON 2020 research project Building a low-carbon, climate resilient future: Research and innovation in support of the European Green Deal (EGD) called PHOENIX (Participation in HOlistic ENvironmental/Ecological Innovations) will start. PHOENIX will centre its attention on the more holistic concept of Democratic Innovation (DI ), a term associated with efforts to make the democratic process more accessible , which includes spaces where citizens have been able to organise themselves in order to shape a constructive dialogue and effective arenas of negotiation with political actors.

As a visual reference, PHOENIX has chosen the metaphor of the Tangram. The puzzle’s seven tans can be assembled together to form thousands of different shapes within its square frame.

For PHOENIX, the Tangram method clearly visualises the possibility of imagining a series of tools and different participatory and deliberative methodologies (the coloured tans). These can be combined in order to design diverse forms of Enriched Democratic Innovations (the shapes), which can better help to face the challenges of the European Green Deal in different situated contexts.

Professor of Economic Geography at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences, Dimitris Ballas, has been granted 276,650 euro to join PHOENIX on behalf of the University of Groningen. His team’s main contribution to PHOENIX (and to the Tangram method) will be in the analysis and geovisualisation of suitable secondary data sets and in the development and application of suitable socio-spatial simulations, including spatial microsimulation and agent-based models. The University of Groningen research team will also include Richard Rijnks, Daniella Vos (both also in the Faculty of Spatial Sciences) and Wander Jager (Center for Social Complexity Studies / University College Groningen).

PHOENIX connects a multidisciplinary consortium of 15 partners from the EU and associated countries. They include academic partners encompassing: political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, ICT experts, psychologists, geographers, town planners and a series of methodological partners with an experienced background in organising and evaluating participatory and deliberative processes and e-governance through ICT platforms which facilitate social dialogue. The project has a total budget of nearly 5 million euro. The consortium is co-ordinated by the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra in Portugal.