Category: practitioners

Transdisciplinary Research – Meeting FixMyCity and Liquid Democracy in Berlin

Transdisciplinarity as cooperation with practice is an enormously relevant aspect for our project. In order to incorporate the ideas and requirements of practice into the development of our concepts and procedures at an early stage, we went to Berlin on October 24th and 25th.

Once there, we first went to a meeting in the offices of FixMyCity, where Boris Hekele was waiting for us. After a short tour of the work spaces in the former Tempelhof Airport, the founder of FixMyCity told us about past and current experiences with participation in mobility transitions – mainly the improvement of cycle paths and cycle parking in various districts in Berlin. This gave us an insight into participation procedures currently running mainly online.

After a long walk across the Tempelhof field and thus the assessment of the impact of a previous participation procedure on the design of urban space, we finally arrived at the office of Liquid Democracy. We discussed the potentials of automated evaluation in participation procedures and possible deliberative potentials of these. The exchange was very helpful for us to identify needs in practice, as well as for the further conceptualization of the dissertations and the orientation of these towards problems in practice.

On Friday we had our first meeting with our mentor Dr. Oliver Lah and the Urban Change Maker Group, where we discussed our dissertation ideas in an international environment. The focus was again on the automated evaluation of participation contributions and the representativeness of procedures in the field of sustainable mobility. The feedback was very helpful for the further design of the dissertation projects.