Participation Methods

Approaches to use urban spaces in a creative way

* mental maps / Kartography
To get information of people living in a neighbourhood, we have to make them speak about their perception of their living surrounding. One way to get this is to ask them painting a map of their neighbourhood on a white paper. By recording their explainations of their drawings, informal informations can be collected. Such information are mostly not taken into consideration in urban development politics and rarely asked even though they are important for a better understanding of the inhabitants' opinions and perceptions of their neighbourhood.
The urban space is like a frame or a point to start from where peoples' stories can be elaborated.
* Story catcher

"Going where the people are" is one of the main keys in order to build trust and take inhabitants serious. "Story catcher" is an approach to make people "speak" about their neighbourhoods. Therefore the story catchers are taking a bike packed with a table and at least two chairs. Then they go to different places in the neighbourhoods and invite people to join them and share their stories.

* guerilla marketing
Using public urban spaces in order to make advertisment can make people curious. But therefore, the important information should smoothly be added to an installation that, at a first step, is not giving any information other than making people aware of the sight. In a second step the installation should be enlarged to indicate that it is under construction / in a process. Inbetween little hints are given what this installation is about. And only at the last step information is given what it is for: f.ex. an invitation to an Open Space meeting.
* deriva urbana

To discover a neighbourhood, we have to widen our perception and awareness of what is happening around us. The deriva urbana is a way of walking in the city and getting lost in order to concentrate of the experiences of urban spaces. Little tasks can be given, such as taking care of sounds, smells, pollution, people etc...

* world café

The world café mainly aims to share informations & experiences and to develope common ideas among the partcipants in a way that the participants get a chance to talk to many other participants - this way the ideas are continously developed during the world café through differrent people. We experienced a world café ourselves in Turin and some of us moderated a world café in their fields of working afterwards.

* fishbowl discussion

A fishbowl discussion is a tool for decision taking in a participatory process. Participants of the discussion group are split up in 3 people trying to find a decision "on the stage" and the other participants that act as an "audience" and that can give ideas into the group "on the stage". Through this method a decision shall be taken that everybody feels connected with because everybody could integrate themself and took place in the whole decision. During our project we found the method was working differently successfull.