One neighborhood in Groningen, the Netherlands, is a neighborhood housing about 12,000 citizens with on average a low-SES background, showing a less healthy and active lifestyle. In the past, initiatives have been undertaken to promote active lifestyle by implementing outdoor facilities stimulating physical …

The liveability of cities worldwide is under threat by the predicted increase in intensity and frequency of heatwaves and the absence of a clear spatial overview of where action to address this. Heat stress impairs vital urban functions (Böcker and Thorsson 2014), hits the local economy (Evers et al. …

Background and objectives Before the Covid-19 pandemic, important social studies already indicated the severe negative feedback associated with high-rise developments. During the Covid-19 pandemic, citizens were confronted with their neighbourhoods’ insufficient restorative capacity to maintain their …

The term Civic Prototyping is a shorthand for making creative prototyping accessible to anyone who tries to improve the world around them. This means contesting, hacking and innovating with technology on your own terms. This also means creatively engaging technology as a tool for supporting “democracy …

On Saturday the 2nd of July, students and researchers of the NoorderRuimte Research Center organized a participatory event, in collaboration with the local citizen initiative Duurzaam Oosterpark. They exchanged information with local citizens about the main housing types in the district and how they …

Increasingly, discussions on sustainability, in particular in relation to energy transition, are finding their way to the regional and local political arena. Although for analysing transition pathways on these sub-national scales, conceptual frameworks such as the multi-level perspective may be helpful, …

In this paper, we apply a civic perspective and social innovation theory to examine how residents of a Dutch village experiencing rural depopulation and austerity reforms evaluate a civic initiative aimed at improving liveability, and what explains their evaluation. Using multivariate statistical analysis, …