Application Results
Dear Applicants to the “Citizens Conference on the European City of Tomorrow”,
First of all many thanks to all of you on behalf of the RAISE consortium and the European Commission for having responded to the Citizens Conference on the European City of Tomorrow call for participants.
It was an interesting and exciting experience for all of us to read from the 570 applications received your perceptions of today’s city life and challenges of the city of tomorrow, in different countries of Europe.
The purpose of this communication is now to provide all of you with some useful and practical information on:
Finally, we thought useful to give a sample of citizens “Voice”. These thoughts are only a subjective selection from a wider set of different and all interesting views, and they are necessarily anonymous for privacy reasons.
The European Citizens Conference on the City of Tomorrow: Applicants profile
From the 570 applications received, two features are striking. Among the candidates, there are many “knowledge workers” – lawyers, attorneys, barristers, interpreters, students, researchers, managers – and most of them are truly ‘European’ citizens, born in one country and living now in another, or having spent part of their life outside their native country in the past.
Surely, this is not the average situation of the European population today but we hope the 570 applicants will represent a good sample of “early adopters” of the future “European knowledge society”, whose attainment is the main goal of the Lisbon Agenda. In addition, country differences and borders are and will remain obviously important, but social mobility across Europe is destined to increase, if the European Union will continue to facilitate the free movement of people in search of life opportunities, exchange of ideas, etc.
This result doesn’t come out as a surprise as people were invited to submit the applications through Internet and probably the persons having this status are more dedicated to use Internet, speak English and can use more flexibly their time, arranging more easily the participation to the Citizens Conference.
Based on your answers on the application forms, we produced a set of statistics per country and gender, age group (15-25 ; 26-55 ; 56+), education, social status (student, working, retired, jobless), type of employment (employee, employer, independent), type of household (single, family with and without children), location (city centre, city periphery, rural area, suburban centres) and mobility behaviour (use of own car, public transport, bicycle, walk or rented car). You may see the full set of statistics clicking here. Briefly, we may note the following:
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The number of applications received from the different EU countries is uneven, but we gathered a sufficient number of applications for most of the countries – with the exception of Lithuania, Slovenia, Estonia and Luxembourg, where the applicants are less than five (thus reducing the scope of random selection). The four applications from Luxembourg are all from natives of other countries. Outside EU, the country with more applications was Romania, and we decided then to select a 26 th citizen from that country.
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As it concerns the demographic profile of the applicants, 56% are male and 44% females, 13,5% are in the age class 15-25 years, 74,7% in the class 25-55 years, and 11,8% in the age class 56-80. Looking at the social status and type of employment, 15,7% are students, 5,2% retired, 4,3% jobless, 74,8% working, and among those working, 66% are employee, 5,3% employers, and 28,7% independent (self-employed). With regard to the household typology, there are 47,8% singles, 32,4% families with children, and 19,9% families without children. The distribution of location follows a centre-periphery pattern: 44,8% applicants live in the city centre, 30,6% in the city periphery, 14,1% in suburban centres, and 10,5% in rural areas. All the mobility habits are represented: 37,3% use public transport, 37% the own car, 13% are used to cycle and 11,9% to walk, and there is also a small share of car renters (probably car sharing users).
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Education deserves a special note. The great majority of applicants – 88,1% - has an University degree, 10,5% high school and 1,4% primary education. This is perhaps the characteristic more distant from the European average reality, where we have far less people graduated at University. Although one of the European Union Lisbon Agenda goals is to increase the “knowledge society” – and then implicitly tertiary educated people – we need to be aware that the applicants to the Citizens Conference over-represent this category, and their views cannot be taken as representative of the truly lay citizens in Europe. However, we need also to remind here that the scope of the Citizens Conference is to evaluate the awareness and acceptance of City of Tomorrow research results – while we do not have any ambition of making an experiment of direct democracy to evaluate urban policies in Europe – and therefore we consider the bias towards people more sensible to research undertakings, as tertiary educated people typically are, an acceptable feature.
The European Citizens Conference on the City of Tomorrow: Panel selection procedure and results
The selection of the 26 citizens from the EU25 countries plus Romania has been performed using an original RAISE software for random selection that works as follows:
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A citizen is selected randomly from each country of the list, and the features of the citizen – gender, age, social status etc. – are recorded. A second citizen with similar characteristics is extracted in each country to serve as deputy panellist, in case the selected candidate of that country will renounce to commit him/herself to participate.
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At each random extraction, the software controls that the selected candidates have as a whole almost the same distribution of characteristics – gender, age, social status, etc. – of the total population of applicants, in order to ensure the representativeness of the citizens panel.
The outcome of the random selection was the panel of 26 citizens and the related deputy candidates now shown clicking here
Two main circumstances must be noted. The first is that, as there were many cases of persons born in one country and living in another, the selection by country of residence sometime gave as a result a non-native citizen. In the panellists selection, we considered important that nationality and country of residence coincide. Therefore, we made systematically two parallel random selections, by country of residence and nationality, and whenever the selection by country failed to find a native citizen, we considered the citizen extracted in the random selection by nationality. The only case in which it was impossible to use this methodology was Luxembourg, as there are no citizens born in this country in the total population of applicants.
A second circumstance is that we tried to avoid that people that could have a ‘biast view’ (e.g. people currently involved in European research projects; research students in urban environment issues, politicians, NGOs representatives, etc) were included in the citizens panel as well as, on the other extreme, people with ‘no view’ on their city (e.g. people who did not fill in the application form with their motivation or perception). We therefore classified some applicants as “experts” and some others as “not providing information on their motivation/perception”. These applicants did not enter in the random selection process. All the others entered instead with different weights: “high”, “medium” or “low”. The weights were assigned based on the answers given to the open questions in the application form related to the citizen’s motivation and perception of the city challenges. The evaluation has been undertaken by 8 members of the RAISE team, reading independently all the application forms received and giving a score. In order to reduce the otherwise unavoidable subjectivity of this evaluation, the score assigned to each citizen was the most frequent one sorting out from the 8 parallel evaluations. People with “high” score were given a double probability of being extracted than people with “medium” score, who in turn had a double probability of being extracted than people with “low” score.
The European Citizens Conference on the City of Tomorrow: practical instructions for the selected panellists
The persons selected as panellists will be contacted directly by e-mail and phone by a member of the RAISE team from 20 May to 10 June 2005. After a short interview, they will be asked to sign a letter of commitment, (a template is available clicking here). The scope of this formal arrangement is to ensure that, besides any force majeure, they will be committed to participate to the Conference. This will allow us to make all the practical arrangements needed to facilitate their attendance, including the early booking and purchase of flight tickets for the ones not using other travel arrangements (we will provide you with flights tickets, while rail or own car use reimbursements will be liquidated at the workshops).
If the first choice selected citizens will decide not to commit him/herself to participate at the Conference, we will contact immediately the deputy panellist in the reserve list.
Early in July, once the formal commitments and travel arrangements are completed, we will distribute to the citizens panel a blueprint of the workshops programmes and supporting documents. The documents will serve as introduction to the “sustainable city” concept and the state of the art of the City of Tomorrow research on urban sustainability issues (including sustainable mobility, sustainable housing, urban design and environment).
The European Citizens Conference on the City of Tomorrow: possible involvement of non-selected applicants in the Citizens Conference process outcome
As the number and high quality of the applications received was striking, we considered it as a pity that we needed to select a sample of only 26 citizens. Therefore, we would like to arrange for a follow-up to give the opportunity to all the non-selected citizens to comment upon the work undertaken by the formal panel.
Why do we want to involve all of you? Because the voice of 570 citizens is stronger than the voice of 26!
In practice, we would like to consult you in between the third workshop and the final conference in Brussels. You will receive a questionnaire where you will be asked to indicate your degree of consensus with the recommendations given in the Citizens Panel Declaration on the European City of Tomorrow, and eventually provide additional comments . The aim of this consultation will be to strengthen the conclusions of the Citizen Panel asking a wider group of concerned citizens to validate them.
We hope you will find this opportunity useful. Of course, any comment you may have on this consultation process or other lateral activities in support to the work of the Citizen Conference are very welcome !
Exploitation of the Citizens Conference approach: towards new citizens conferences on urban sustainable development at national and city level?
At the end of the Citizens Conference process, we will prepare a set of guidelines showing the goals and methodology we followed.
We believe the Citizens Conference concept can be easily replicated at national, regional, local or even neighbourhood scale, adopting “citizens capturing” and random selection procedures similar to the one just experimented in RAISE. From a content perspective, there should be two minimal common denominators for organising Citizens Conferences on the City of Tomorrow although at different levels. The first common feature should be the focus on the EU sustainable development strategy, and the need to achieve a balanced economic, social and environmental development of our continent - by acting at all levels, and especially on a urban scale. A second common goal of these conferences should be to evaluate systematically what the EU research on urban sustainability has to offer to improve the quality of life in cities, and what can be done at the local level with the help of concerned citizens, key stakeholders and politicians. This will at least greatly help to solve the problem of communication towards the citizens of what is happening at the European level.
Of course, to believe in the dissemination of the Citizens Conference approach we need to be – as suggested by one of the applicants –very naïve or utopist! However, utopia is not necessarily bad, if it helps us to set goals to improve our life in the future, provided that we find the way to proceed step by step towards those goals, enhancing gradually our understanding and influence on our urban environment. Citizens conferences on the City of Tomorrow may become an useful tool in this sense.
We feel committed to promote the RAISE Citizens conferences on the City of Tomorrow approach. If you are interested to take it up towards your national, regional or local governments feel free to use the RAISE guidelines when ready and do not hesitate to contact us for any suggestion or specific advice you might need. We can work together and build up new projects following the RAISE approach.
