From heatwaves to civic action: how participation can shape climate resilience

As the climate clock accelerates, disenchantment with participation risks stalling the green transition. Cities like Paris are testing new co-creation methods to mobilise residents and drive meaningful regeneration. Because in a warming world, shared decision-making can't be an afterthought—it's a survival strategy.

It is two o'clock on a working afternoon at the end of June, 2050, and the city has fallen silent. A line of ambulances waits outside the emergency room of the Salpétrière hospital, while schools have brought the holidays forward. A handful of people drift through the streets in a surreal hush, clutching water bottles, shielding themselves with hats. On a bench, a woman is crying: the 70-degree asphalt has melted the glue of her sandals, leaving her barefoot. The underground is shut down by a widespread power outage, and shops without air conditioning have closed their doors. The few that remain open are sheltering residents from the top floors, driven out of their homes beneath Paris's iconic zinc rooftops, uninsulated and scorching after days of relentless heat. Inside, temperatures have reached 60 degrees. The city's heat emergency number is permanently jammed. Today alone, the heatwave has claimed the lives of 200 elderly people. Paris has become a desert of sun and thirsty ghosts. Adieu, ville lumière, see you again in autumn.

This is the dystopian future the French capital could be facing in just twenty-five years. According to some studies, Paris could reach 50 degrees Celsius in summer, a rare but not impossible eventuality. The data is frightening but also important, as it pushes the city to adapt to climate change through a profound regeneration. For years Paris has been changing, not without controversy: numerous roads have been closed to traffic, cycling has been encouraged, and parking costs have increased. Today, according to an independent ICOS cities report, Paris boasts a 25% reduction in greenhouse emissions compared to 2015 and could halve its emissions by 2030, even if progress is currently insufficient to envisage a zero-emissions scenario for 2050. There have been two drivers of improvement: a reduction in emissions from combustion engines (fewer kilometres travelled, less polluting cars) and energy renovation of buildings.

"Over the last 20 years, emissions of fine particles and nitrogen dioxide have halved," says Lou Méchin of Airparif. "But there are still 1,800 premature deaths per year in Paris due to air pollution".

Reconciling green transition and solidarity

The challenge now is to reconcile green transition and solidarity so that a sustainable lifestyle and low-emission housing are within everyone's reach. Here too, France can draw on a certain amount of experience in participation, having been the first country to experiment citizens' climate convention (made up of 150 citizens chosen at random, representing the entire population) in 2019. The aim was formulating solutions to reduce emissions in a "spirit of social justice". This experiment was met with considerable criticism as not all of the proposals were ultimately accepted by the Élysée, but attracted international attention, even if there is still a long way to go to rebuild trust.

Participation: reviving a word that lost its power

"The term 'citizen participation' has often been used to describe citizen consultation, which is a lower level of engagement. Here, we aim for a higher level of participation through co-construction", explains Nina Moussé, head of the European GINNGER project for the Paris Climate Agency, illustrating one of the project's pilots in Belleville. This historically popular neighbourhood is transforming from a suburb into a centre of participatory innovation in the green transition. This approach builds on fertile ground, past initiatives and a vibrant social fabric, actively supported by the city hall of the 20th arrondissement. But how does it work in practice? It starts with data. The green potential of every corner of the neighbourhood is carefully mapped, and residents are then engaged through targeted communication designed to show them that they can become first-hand actors in the green transition. "We analysed the data to identify where real potential exists, and that is where we focus our efforts. This is not a traditional public consultation. We are trying to reach people who may not even know that support is available, or that there are concrete opportunities in their own area", Moussé explains. There is no point in proposing an urban garden where there is already one, or photovoltaic panels where they cannot be installed. The latter will be proposed to those residents who have the best surface area to accommodate them, so they will participate in the green transition with conviction once the potential of the project has been understood.

Creating and deciding. Together is better

Though, new, inclusive and participatory processes of neighbourhood regeneration are not only tested in Belleville. The heart of GINNGER is the co-creation methodology aimed at supporting "collaborative decision-making, also with a set of 13 digital solutions to design and implement regeneration plans". The co-creation methodology in five phases (co-assessment phase, co-decision phase, in which most projects are currently located, co-planning phase, co-implementation phase and co-learning phase) has already been set out. "Through this methodology, we would like to involve stakeholders in assessing the neighbourhood's requirements, in deciding on the most important actions to be taken, in planning these actions, and in learning lessons through the implementation of these actions. We also want to involve them in the implementation of every regeneration action, as we know from previous experience that it is very difficult to involve all citizens and stakeholders from the beginning to the end of the process," says project manager, Montserrat Lanero Martinez.

Beyond Belleville, the project includes pilot projects in Langreo and Murcia (Spain), where work is underway to create energy communities based on renewable sources, in Plovdiv (Bulgaria), where the focus is on the renovation of residential buildings toward energy efficient performance and Massagno (Switzerland) plus Orte (Italy) pilots, where work is being done to improve living conditions with a focus on sustainable mobility. "We decided to work on several and different profiles/situations, so I'm confident that the co-creation methodology will be scaleable and could also be applied in other sectors of public life", Lanero Martinez says.

Fighting disenchantment, rebuilding trust

Assuming that public trust can indeed be rebuilt, disenchantment with participatory projects remains the greatest hurdle to overcome, according to our interlocutors. "I remember the redevelopment of several neighbourhoods in Porto Alegre, such as Vila Planetário—recalls Giovanni Allegretti, researcher at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, architect and expert in participatory processes. The project had been approved through participatory budgeting, yet the residents who had been evacuated from the buildings due for renovation ended up sleeping in makeshift huts nearby, to keep an eye on the works. Participatory processes always generate huge expectations and equally deep disappointments."

It is an extreme example, but one that vividly illustrates how urban regeneration strikes at profound emotional and social chords. This is precisely why, when we speak of the green transition, it's something that often entails the large-scale regeneration of entire cities, buildings and neighbourhoods, shared decision-making cannot be treated as an afterthought. "Since the 1920s—Allegretti explains—participation has been framed as citizen involvement, but in practice it revolved around professionals and technical experts sometime representing communities, and more rarely mobilising them. In 1968, admittedly with some excesses, this model was denounced as manipulative, and participatory processes were pushed towards self-management (as clearly requested by Sherry Arnstein in her "ladder of participation") in order to maintain their capacity to defend inclusion and redistributive justice. In the years that followed, facilitation techniques grew and spread around the planet, leading to the creation of "safe spaces" where all inhabitants could feel comfortable in taking part to political decision-making. Gradually it became clear that issues such as urban planning were highly complex, and experts couldn't simply be reduced to facilitators. With the new millennium, attempts were made to strike a balance between "technicalisation" of participatory methodologies and ethical/political values related to socio-environmental justice, and this occurred at the very moment when environmental awareness was rising. Hence, it became clear how essential it was to actively seek citizens' views on environmental issues."

Yet meaningful participation requires understanding. The epistemic dimension, access to knowledge, becomes decisive. Ensuring this in an age marked by growing cognitive impoverishment is one of the toughest challenges facing practitioners today. Then comes the political dimension. "At present—Allegretti concludes—it is hard to be optimistic about European or national commitment to the long-term defence of participatory processes. But at the local level, small steps remain possible, for instance through the institutionalisation of funding for projects generated by participatory pathways, with the condition that if they are not implemented, the money must be returned. What is needed is to consolidate alliances between local and regional participatory experiences, so that they can influence higher tiers of government, struggling together". In short, small steps may be better than standing still, but in the face of climate change, they are no longer enough.

Photo by Dirk Van Geel on iStock

Contacts

Project Coordinator

CIRCE | Montserrat Lanero mlanero@fcirce.es

Communication secretariat

Fondazione ICONS info@ginnger-project.eu

Project website
https://ginnger-project.eu/
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