Reimagining Urban Blue Through Place-Based Citizen Science with Temporarily Displaced Children
What can be better than spending a hot summer day on a lake? Only doing so with friends, helping ecologists and urban planners to reimagine our cities! In “Water Rangers Twente” (The Netherlands), children from Ukraine learn about planetary health, collect data, and solve a challenge — designing an inclusive, healthy, attractive urban blue place. The initiative uniquely combines nature, science, art and technology, and contributes to children’s well-being. It includes them in the public
Local
Netherlands
Twente, province Overijssel
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As individual(s) in partnership with organisation(s)
First name: Ekaterina Last name: Miller Gender: Female Please describe the type of organization(s) you work in partnership with: University of Twente, Almelo Municipality and the management board of Huize Alexandra refugee centre, Natuur en Milieu, Netherlands Institute for Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) Nationality: Ukraine Function: Community manager Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Vriezenveenseweg 170 Town: Almelo Postal code: 7602 PV Country: Netherlands Direct Tel:+31 6 16660414 E-mail:millersartstudios@gmail.com
First name: Ekaterina Last name: Egorova Gender: Female Please describe the type of organization(s) you work in partnership with: Almelo Municipality and the management board of Huize Alexandra refugee centre, Natuur en Milieu, Netherlands Institute for Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) Nationality: Russia Function: Geographic Citizen Science Researcher at the Geographic Citizen Science Hub (Faculty ITC, University of Twente) Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Hengelosestraat 99 Town: Enschede Postal code: 7514 AE Country: Netherlands Direct Tel:+31 6 38998563 E-mail:e.egorova@utwente.nl Website:https://www.itc.nl/research/open-science/citizen_science/geo-cs-hub/#
“Water Rangers Twente” is an educational initiative involving temporarily displaced children (age group 9-14), designed to contribute to their knowledge of ecology and sustainability, but also to provide space for meaningful activity and positive emotions, restoration of sociality and safety. It thus contributes to their well-being, participation in public life, place discovery and place bonding.
The initiative relies on several front-running trends, including citizen science, nature- and challenge-based learning. During 3-week summer campaigns, children go on bicycling field trips to collect data about small water bodies such as ponds and canals (which often stay out of the focus of ecologists for the lack of data). First, they measure the water quality (e.g., water transparency, presence of water animals) and take water samples for the nationwide Dutch citizen science project “Vang de Watermonsters”. Second, they observe the place and fill in protocols on its attractiveness and accessibility for humans. Following the field trips, participants confront a challenge — designing an urban blue place that is ecologically healthy and attractive to humans. In the summer campaign of 2023, the best projects chosen by the jury will be brought to life in the form of temporal installations.
The initiative has a vital co-creation component. Following the pilot in the summer of 2022, 11 participants are now engaged in the co-design of the main campaign in 2023, exploring and choosing data collection applications, testing sensors from the senseBox Toolkit, improving protocols and other aspects of the campaign. The summer campaign of 2023 will include up to 60 participants from the refugee centers in Twente, but also from local schools.
Making all project materials and learnings open access, we call for the wide adoption of such novel educational forms, since they engage people and places that need it most, and have transforming effects on multiple levels.
Temporarily displaced youth
Citizen science
Planetary health
Urban blue
Design thinking
The key objective of the initiative in terms of sustainability is threefold: a) to educate children about sustainability, b) to develop related competencies, and c) to introduce them to relevant local practices. To address the first objective, the project introduces children to the concept of planetary health which highlights how everything is connected. On the example of urban blue spaces, children explore how changing natural systems also affects humans. The project further zooms into environmental sustainability by focusing on aquatic ecosystems. The second objective is achieved through the active citizen science component and field trips, where children collect and analyze data, build hypotheses, and solve a challenge. In doing so, they develop competencies such as systems thinking and collective action. The third objective of the project is achieved through a number of embedded activities — for example, each field trip includes the collection and sorting of litter. Moreover, field trips are conducted on bicycles, which helps children (who do not use bicycles on a daily basis back in Ukraine) feel safer on the road and sparkles discussions on the environmental friendliness of bicycling as an alternative to cars and public transport. Focus groups conducted after the pilot in 2022 revealed an increased understanding of environmental sustainability and issues related to global pollution and loss of biodiversity. The initiative is exemplary in the sense that it relies on a novel and intuitive framework of planetary health that is comprehensive for youth. Participants gain a wide range of skills while playing an active role in a scientific process targeted at the protection of aquatic ecosystems. Not only do they engage in local cultural practices related to sustainability, but they also learn to think about planetary health as a whole and develop competencies that will help them become active in protecting our planet in the future.
Natural places are characterized by aesthetic qualities of beauty, greenness, comfort, and tranquility, and have a therapeutic effect on newly arrived youth. Visiting natural urban areas can also recall landscapes of the home country, bringing about moments of familiarity and memory that are important for place bonding. Also places that allow for the restoration of basic needs for opportunity, sociality, and safety are known to benefit refugees (Sampson and Gifford, 2010). The key objective of the initiative in terms of aesthetics and quality of experience for people is to expose newly arrived youth to aesthetically appealing urban blue spaces, further enhancing the quality of their experience through the restoration of other basic needs. Through the citizen science component, the initiative brings a meaningful activity: new responsibilities, skills, and knowledge help participants to restore a sense of competence and build their personal status within the community. The project also restores sociality: working closely in teams, participants get to know each other better and make new friends, shaping a social network that can provide mutual support. Positive emotions are further enhanced through the embedding of gamification (e.g., geocaching) and creativity (e.g., designing a healthy place). The project is exemplary in its multifaceted nature. Apart from education, it provides space for the restoration of basic needs and place discovery, facilitating place bonding through positive emotions and memories. All of these components were reflected in an impact assessment study following the pilot in the summer of 2022.
Reference:
Sampson, R., & Gifford, S. M. (2010). Place-making, settlement and well-being: The therapeutic landscapes of recently arrived youth with refugee backgrounds. Health & place, 16(1), 116-131.
Here, the key objectives are to a) include newly arrived youth into the public space and foster transcultural connection, b) empower youth through inclusion, equity, and co-creation, and c) contribute to inclusive cities and governance systems. With respect to the first objective, children gain an opportunity to engage with longstanding residents, both directly, through interaction, and indirectly, for example through observing local youth activities in urban blue spaces. Although episodic, such interactions contribute to the sense of connectedness and belonging and facilitate the learning of place affordances. With respect to the second objective, this intergenerational project is also equity-oriented: participants choose tasks according to their liking and abilities (e.g., from using a bucket to collect water to filling in protocols). Inclusion is further enhanced by enabling youth to co-create the next campaign’s activities. With respect to the third objective, the project supports inclusive urban planning through the development of participatory methodologies with children. Increasing participation of temporarily displaced youth in public life and fostering collaboration with the municipality and the refugee facility adds to the government’s capacity to engage with a vulnerable community in a transparent and meaningful way. The initiative is thus exemplary in two aspects. First, it allows participants to build footholds in new environments, but also “to contribute to these new environments, to leave a mark, a ’footprint’” (Rishbeth et al., 2019, p.132). Second, it fosters the participation of youth in important processes such as the movement toward sustainability, which is crucial for resilient and inclusive cities.
Reference:
Rishbeth, et al. "Participation and wellbeing in urban greenspace: ‘curating sociability’ for refugees and asylum seekers." Geoforum 106 (2019): 125-134.
The pilot campaign in 2022 was largely designed by project leads, although participating youth still had a lot of freedom in the process. Thus, apart from creating presentations along the suggested lines for the closing event, children showed a lot of initiative and created their own additional outputs (a collage, a video, and a photo gallery) adding invaluable creativity to the outputs project. Having enjoyed the campaign, participants were also very active in focus groups on how to improve the project and provided multiple insights on how to make the summer campaign 2023 more attractive to youth. Currently, children that were interested in co-designing the main campaign are having regular meetings with the project lead and the community manager to conceptualize the final set of activities and technology to be used during the main project. To provide a few examples, participants help to adjust protocols and make them more age-appropriate, they test and vote on data collection applications, explore and suggest data collection techniques (e.g., visual storytelling), and plan dissemination activities. The impact of this active involvement cannot be overestimated: children’s participation shapes the project through the unique co-creation component, making it more youth-friendly and helping children to gain ownership of the project. Parents of involved children are fully supporting this engagement, and help with organizing the co-creation sessions. The refugee location management board helps the project team to establish connections and recruit participants for the summer campaign 2023, presenting the outcomes of the previous campaign and collecting letters of interest to join the project from other refugee facilities.
The key stakeholder is the Geo Citizen Science Hub, University of Twente (UT). Through connections with the Red Cross, members of the Hub became aware of one of the concerns of newly arrived families from Ukraine — the disruption of children’s education. The project was developed in response to this need. Elements of the project related to place attractiveness for humans were designed by the Geo Citizen Science Hub members. Project leaders also scanned national projects on water data collection, in order to embed the ecology-related part of the initiative into an existing project, making it more sustainable and connecting to a bigger community. Nation-wide “Vang de Watermonster”, run by Natuur en Milieu and NIOO-KNAW, was willing to support “Water Rangers Twente” and provided data collection materials. Educational micro-modules were, and are, being designed in consultation with UT Pre-University, which works with schools. “Planetary health” and “Aquatic ecosystems” were designed in consultation with the Planetary Health Alliance and “Vang de Watermonsters”. “Design Thinking” and “Geospatial Data Exploration” are being developed with the DesignLab (UT) and CRIB geospatial platform (UT) respectively. For the implementation phase, one of the adults from the refugee facility accepted the position of community manager. In the pilot, the community manager and the project lead were the two adults overseeing the implementation of the project. Children’s parents took turns chaperoning children during the field trips. Questions related to ecology were posted through the “Vang de Watermonsters” Facebook page, and one of the ecologists attended the closing event to provide feedback. The Almelo municipality and the refugee facility manager provided administrative support and shared the costs of the reward trip. The same distribution of roles is planned for the campaign 2023, and the project team will be expanded through the engagement of students.
Key research questions addressed within the project relate inclusive urban planning and fall within the expertise of Faculty ITC. The following fields contribute further to the project. Citizen science shapes the initiative, and the corresponding expertise is brought by the project lead. As a result, the project goes beyond being purely educational and includes scientific contributions to several fields. Research with children contributes to the conceptualization of children’s participation. In our project, children understand the intentions of the initiative, know who made the decisions concerning their involvement and why, and have a meaningful (rather than a “decorative”) role. Based on the state of the art, the project approaches children as competent actors capable of interpreting their environment, which provides children with the ownership of the project. Educational sciences account for the several front-running trends embedded in the initiative, such as challenge-based learning. The design of education activities is a collaboration between education specialists from Pre-University (UT) and researchers in particular fields (e.g., design thinking), as part of regular activities within the Geo Citizen Science Hub. Resulting novel educational forms empower the project through age-appropriate learning. Ecology is being brought to the project through the expertise of the “Vang de Watermonsters” team. This mutually beneficial collaboration brings a strong ecology-related component to our project while widening participation in “Vang de Watermonsters”. Design thinking perspective, embedded into the project in collaboration with researchers from the DesignLab (UT) contributes with methodologies that act from the human experience, involving stakeholders, and incorporating co-creation. It contributes to the meaningful co-creation activities within the project while also teaching children key methods such as empathy mapping for helping them solve the project challenge.
Designed for children affected by temporal displacement, the initiative provides an innovative solution that addresses the needs of a vulnerable group requiring particular attention. The educational component relies on several front-running pedagogical trends: challenge-based learning (challenge to design an urban blue place), trans- and multi-disciplinary curriculum (several knowledge fields in the project curriculum), life-long learning (micro-modules), citizen science (embedding into a national citizen science project), nature- and place-based learning (field trips to public urban spaces), and co-creation (participation in the design of the main project). As such, the initiative transforms deeply the physical and social place of education and leads to several outcomes that go far beyond knowledge acquisition. First, it provides unique opportunities for the restoration of self, opportunity, sociability, and safety — basic needs that affect the well-being of refugees. Second, it facilitates place discovery and connects newly arrived children to the local community, contributing to place bonding, a sense of belonging, and transcultural connectedness. Third, it provides children with transferrable skills and competencies (e.g., systems thinking, collective action) that will allow them to become environmental ambassadors and active members of society in the future. The initiative thus conceptualizes and promotes learning as a type of nature-based social prescription that can “promote nature contact, strengthen social structures, and improve longer term mental and physical health by activating intrapersonal, interpersonal, and environmental processes” (Leavell et al., p.297).
Reference:
Leavell, M. A., et al. "Nature-based social prescribing in urban settings to improve social connectedness and mental well-being: a review." Current Environmental Health Reports 6 (2019): 297-308.
In its simplified form, the project can be adopted by local citizen science centers, municipalities, and NGOs working with temporarily displaced children as a type of educational outdoor activity that contributes to place bonding and well-being. Citizen science projects collecting water quality data can be found across and beyond Europe and can be easily joined, following the example of our initiative. Certain components can be flexibly adjusted to available resources — for example, data collection can be performed through paper protocols in the absence of smartphones. One of our outputs will include a step-by-step roadmap and resources for designing and conducting a similar initiative (not necessarily focused on water bodies) in another locality. Importantly, the initiative can also be adopted by schools and other educational entities that work with the general public. Individual elements of the project can also be readily transferred to other contexts. First, the cross-cutting micro-modules developed for the project can be leveraged in a variety of other learning contexts, for example by educators committed to learning for the green transition and sustainable development. Second, the methodological package for exploring youth preferences for urban blue space through the challenge of designing an attractive urban blue place can be replicated by researchers and practitioners interested in inclusive youth-oriented urban planning. Third, the methodology for co-creating a citizen science project can be transferred to other citizen science projects looking to engage children in co-creation. Citizen science researchers will also benefit from the methodology for assessing the impact of place-based citizen science on place discovery and restoration of basic needs such as sociality. The outputs of the project will include a toolkit with resources and recommendations for each of these potential use cases.
The project builds upon a group of methodologies united under the umbrella of citizen science. As such, it is designed around the principles of citizen science:
1. It actively involves citizens in a scientific endeavor that generates new knowledge (e.g., participatory methodologies with children, children’s perception of urban spaces)
2. It has a genuine scientific outcome by helping inform environmental protection, as well as by contributing to inclusive urban planning processes.
3. Both professional scientists and citizen scientists benefit from the project. While for the youth the project provides space for learning and restoration, researchers benefit from valuable datasets and methodologies resulting from the project.
4. The youth may, if they wish, participate in multiple stages of the scientific process (e.g., co-creation of the main campaign)
5. Participants receive feedback from the project both from ecologists and geographers.
6. Citizen science is a research approach like any other, and the project meticulously documents limitations and biases to consider.
7. Project data and meta-data will be made publicly available and results will be published in an open-access format.
8. Citizen scientists are and will be acknowledged in project results and publications.
9. The project foresees a multi-faceted evaluation of participant experience and project impact on well-being and place-bonding (finished based on the pilot), as well as on environmental values and attitudes, education, and awareness (embedded into the main campaign).
10. The project takes into consideration legal and ethical issues surrounding copyright, intellectual property, and other aspects of the project. The project went through the approval process by the Ethics Committee of Faculty ITC (UT).
The project provides a local solution to the following three global challenges. First, being designed for the needs of temporarily displaced children from Ukraine who experience the interruption of educational activities, this project is a good example of education that is “a lifeline for children in crisis” (UN, https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal4). While current technologies increasingly allow for online education, initiatives such as “Water Rangers Twente” can become an important complementary activity taking place in the local natural, social, and cultural context. As such, the initiative contributes to SDG 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Second, being designed in a way that would also address the basic needs of newly arrived children, the initiative provides an exemplary space for the restoration of self, opportunity, security, and sociality, which are known to contribute to the well-being of refugees. The initiative thus also provides a local solution to SDG 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages. Third, the initiative empowers an underrepresented community by engaging it in participation in public life and public space. Through its multifaceted design, the project not only educates and empowers participants but also collects important data related both to the environment (e.g., water samples) and to human perceptions (e.g., children’s understanding of what is an attractive urban blue place). Setting up a collaboration between newly arrived children, a municipality, a refugee facility, an environmental organization, and a university, the project contributes to a meaningful and transparent engagement of diverse community stakeholders, which is beneficial for the resilience of urban ecosystems and the human population alike. The project thus also directly addresses SDG 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
The project includes five phases: 1) idea (March-June 2022), 2) pilot (July-August 2022), 3) man project preparation (September 2022-June 2023), 4) main campaign (July-September 2023), 5) outputs (September 2023-February 2024). We are currently in the third stage of the project. The outcomes of the pilot include the first version of micro-modules “Planetary Health” and “Aquatic Ecosystems”, a study on the impact of the project on place discovery (presented at ECSA conference, 2022; submitted to the Journal of Environmental Psychology), a study on children’s perception of the attractiveness of urban blue spaces (in progress). In the current stage (September 2022-June 2023), we are focussing on four activities. First, we are co-designing the campaign of 2023, to empower children and to develop experiences answering their interests, skills, and idea of what's fun. Second, we are improving existing and designing new micro-modules ("Geospatial data exploration", "Design thinking"), to enhance participants' experience through a meaningful engagement with design and technology. Third, we are finalizing the research component of the main project, to further enhance the scientific contribution of the project. Fourth, we are recruiting participants for the main project and networking with national and European initiatives to cross-pollinate and arrange joint activities, to achieve further embedding of the project into bigger initiatives. Following the main campaign (July 2023-September 2023) we will generate outputs and disseminate results (September 2023-February 2024). First, we will publish project materials and a roadmap for designing similar projects, to ensure the transferability of the project to other contexts. Second, we will publish research outputs, to sparkle a scientific discussion and ensure the scientific quality of further similar activities. Third, we will disseminate results through relevant networks, to promote citizen science with newly arrived children.
The project provides space for the development of new competences in all four groups in the European framework on sustainability. Among the embodying sustainability values, participants learn to value sustainability, which has been reflected in their presentations during the closing event in the summer of 2022. Working on the challenge of designing a healthy and attractive urban blue place, children learn to apply design thinking methods such as empathy mapping, which helps them to become aware of fairness and to learn to support it. Building upon the natural curiosity of children, the project sparkles a deep interest in the life of small water bodies and beyond, teaching children to appreciate and promote nature. The project also provides space for embracing complexity in sustainability. Being introduced to the planetary health framework, children develop systems thinking. On the example of urban blue spaces, they learn to see the world in all its complexity, as a system of actors and interactions; such vision leads to a better human-environment interaction on the planet. Children also develop critical thinking (hypothesis generation, data collection, evidence presentation) as part of the scientific component of the project, which fosters independent thinking and the ability to justify their opinion. Project participants also acquire competences required for acting for sustainability. Throughout the project, they see the power of collective action and learn to appreciate team building and collaboration for achieving goals. Focus groups in 2022 reflected the importance of teamwork, and participants provided insightful comments on how to improve collective action in the summer of 2023. Finally, the project provides multiple opportunities for developing exploratory thinking through its cognitive diversity (the snippets of knowledge on ecology and urban planning, technology and design, encounters with researchers and the local community, scientific work, and fun).
