NEWS
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THE CITY OF LUXEMBOURG IS CALLING UPON ITS CITIZENS TO THINK ABOUT THE BEST WAY OF IMPROVING CERTAIN PUBLIC SPACES. TO THAT END, IT HAS IMPLEMENTED A SYSTEM OF ACTIVE CIVIC PARTICIPATION, RUN BY THE MUNICIPALITY’S COORDINATION ESPACE PUBLIC.
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cross the 24 neighbourhoods of the city, there are 250 spaces that are identified as squares or parks. The Coordination espace public is striving to devise and implement projects to improve these spaces. To that end, the Ville de Luxembourg is now calling upon its citizens to get involved. “We perform a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the spaces that might be improved. After that, we call for the involvement of the citizens who are familiar with these spaces, to seek new development proposals,” says Laurent Schwaller, an urban planning expert with the Coordination Espace Public. Local residents, as well as regular or occasional users, are invited to take part in a process that is designed to come up with new proposals for these spaces. Four projects are currently under way: place du Parc in Bonnevoie, for which the initiative came from the inhabitants of the neighbourhood via the Transition BO association; Kaltreis park, also in Bonnevoie, where the City is planning to carry out refurbishment work on the ponds, but is seeking input from the locals concerning the future of the park as a whole; rue de Strasbourg, in the Gare district, where the issues at stake are more social; and place de Gand in Belair, a project which began recently. Citizen involvement takes place in three stages. First of all, residents are invited to take part in a launch meeting via a letter that is sent to all letter boxes in the neighbourhood, and a sign that is affixed beside the open space. During this meeting, the participants share their positive and negative comments and their proposals for this space on a post-it note. Once the ideas have been gathered up, they are read out and discussed. “These meetings provide an opportunity to listen to and establish a dia-
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logue with the citizens. We learn about the inside stories of the neighbourhood, and any ideas are welcome, even if they cannot all be implemented, be it for technical or budgetary reasons,” says Laurent Schwaller. Then, after consulting the various departments of the municipality to ascertain the feasibility of the proposals, workshops are organised to work out what changes need to be made. Pursuant to these workshops, a final meeting is held to present the project that will be implemented. “For rue de Strasbourg, for instance, we succeeded in record time to redevelop the playground, a new entrance for the school and to improve various elements on the street itself. Once a project is completed, you find that the citizens identify more with their neighbourhood, take care of the new structures, and that local community life soon picks up again. For instance, in the course of the inauguration of the playground, a neighbourhood street party was organised by the locals.” Moreover, not all the alterations are necessarily final. “We can afford to experiment, to make a few mistakes. The requirements of the users tend to change over time, just like the users themselves. It is also for this reason that we are interested, as part of these projects, in gathering structural data, such as the breakdown of the households in each neighbourhood, the nationalities, the age groups of the residents, etc.” This is an approach that is flexible and a world away from blind standardisation, enabling the City to address the real requirements, to foster local community life within the neighbourhoods and to improve the environment of its citizens.
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PIECA’S CITY MAGAZINE LUXEMBOURG
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