Project R-14751

Collective listening to communities and spaces as a core capability in planning towards 15-minute suburban Cities (Research)

We are all concerned about mobility, about the neighbourhoods we live in. And we all have our ideas to improve this mobility and these neighbourhoods. But we do not have the same capabilities, social networks and resources to find support for our ideas. And thus, to gain attention, some of us start shouting, while others give up and opt out. As a consequence, debates on concepts like the 15-minute City polarise and transition processes come to a standstill. It is our hypothesis that, in order to accelerate transitions, we need to slow down participatory planning processes and learn to listen to the mobility projects of people around us. To us, listening implies a cyclical process during which we register (mobility) practices, reflect on the values behind and conflicts between these practices and imagine how to recalibrate them. With LISTEN, we will test a framework to strengthen the capacity of civil servants and suburban entrepreneurs to guide citizens, organisations and institutions collectively and simultaneously through processes of collective listening. We will focus on superdiverse suburbs and set up 3 collective listening experiments enabled by 3 listening tools (a 15min radio, 15min atlas and 15min walk).

01 January 2024 - 31 December 2026