In this interview, we speak with Mark van der Veken, project leader and participation advisor at the City of Mechelen. The City of Mechelen is committed to inclusivity and the Speak Up project is a good way to ensure that Mechelen can further develop inclusive citizen engagement initiatives.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and about your organization?
I work as a participation advisor for the city of Mechelen and I am the local project leader of the Speak Up project. Mechelen is a city in Belgium with 89.000 inhabitants. It is a diverse city with 138 different nationalities represented. The City of Mechelen is very active in terms of inclusivity and ensuring active citizen engagement. Furthermore, the City of Mechelen is very active in European projects, such as projects related to mobilizing urban communities in the climate transition, nature restoration and the perspective of water in the city.
What inspired your organization to be part of the Speak Up project?
The City of Mechelen is very active with organizing citizen participation efforts. However, we also deal with certain challenges, such as the participation paradox where the usual participants in these initiatives are often the same individuals or groups. Therefore, we want to make the debate accessible and relevant for a wider range of people. We have already made efforts to improve this. For example, by so called door-to-door engagement efforts, outreach, community building by creating collective impact, putting more societal relevance into participation…. This ensures a more accessible way of creating dialogue and involvement, instead of only organizing informative initiatives at our offices. Our goal is to reach a more diverse range of citizens with our initiatives and to create more active commitment. This should result in a stronger connection between citizens and the government.
It is important to create a transparent, inclusive and accessible environment to engage with citizens.
The Speak Up project is an opportunity for us to further develop our focus on citizen participation. We already do a lot, but through the Speak Up project, we can further improve what we already do and develop new initiatives. Furthermore, the Speak Up project offers the possibility to collaborate with other partners that are facing the same challenges, learn from each other and learn together from the way we can embed new methods or procedures.
What is a recent citizen engagement initiative that you're proud of?
One initiative that we are proud of is the meaningful and layered citizen engagement we designed in our project Masterplan Binnendijle. This large scale and holistic project focuses on the river that runs through Mechelen, climate resilience, urban greening and creation of inclusive public space and activity. To ensure the engagement of diverse voices in the decision-making process, we set up a citizen assembly at the beginning of this project. We managed to get a representative sample of our city. This group of 35 people comes from various educational backgrounds, different neighborhoods and ages from 16 up to 91.
Since nature restoration and water quality in the public domain are important objectives of this project, we did set up a unique experiment. Within this very diverse citizen panel, we included ‘the voice of nature’ as a stakeholder. We approached this with care: a script that gave a lot of space to form opinions in plenary and in small groups, we went outside to experience nature and we made use of imagination and empathy. Furthermore, we used the characteristics of plants and animals and tried to speak out for them, resulting in 122 qualitative recommendations ‘from’ plants and animals. We were finally able to blend them with the interest of human stakeholders to abstract guiding principles on which to build our project. A survey showed us that the participants experienced the assembly as a meaningful engagement. For the project and our city, the assembly generated valuable inputs and guiding principles that will be used throughout the project. In the first quarter of 2025 we will organize a co-creation session on design and sensibilization with residents, user groups and other stakeholders.
Another initiative we are proud of, which is coincidentally connected to the Speak Up project, is our experience in using the Collective Impact Model to address complex challenges in certain neighbourhoods. We used this model to identify and involve various stakeholders and increase effective collaboration between them and our civil servants, to create actions with collective impact, to collect data to improve actions and insights. We want to further explore the possible use of this model through the Speak Up project.
Could you share any upcoming initiatives and events related to Speak Up?
Moreover, on the 11th of December, Mechelen will host a Speak Up congress called ‘Lost in Transition? Participation as key for climate engagement’. Speak Up partners Malmö, Skive and Mechelen will demonstrate their climate pilots during interactive workshops. The city of Mechelen will present the ‘why?’ and the ‘what?’ by zooming in on practical cases, such as our ‘voice of nature’ project. During this day, we discuss with public professionals how to improve our participation approaches and we discuss how to scale them up, as well as how to embed them in the future climate policies of our cities. You can sign-up to the event here!
