Each week, the Lab selects a document or project deemed particularly interesting and relevant and presents it in a few lines. This week, the Lab downloaded and tested the app "My City Garden," providing an opportunity to discuss Greentech and open data.
Green infrastructures… to be appropriated by citizens
Recently, the Lab's selection focused on the benefits of green infrastructures, developments that enhance the value of ecosystem services in urban environments. While the advantages of these green infrastructures over traditional "gray" infrastructures are now being recognized in urban planning policies, promoting them to urban populations requires a genuine strategy and communication tools that help people understand and embrace the city's potential. Such are the promises of the tool "My Garden in the City"[1], a mobile application dedicated to discovering natural spaces in urban settings. At first glance, the idea may seem entertaining, albeit somewhat limited if it only involves listing locations, but its real interest lies in the possibilities it offers for use, both for the average user and for communities.
An application between territorial marketing and citizen engagement
Initially developed for green space managers, municipalities, and local communities, the application and its associated website serve as a communication tool supporting a territorial marketing strategy to highlight green streets, parks, micro-gardens, landscaping, or tree-lined alleys. But beyond being a simple catalog of facilities, it is the use of features that facilitate its adoption, co-development, and the "gamification" of these environmental actions that could trigger a virtuous spiral of urban biodiversity appropriation. The application can also help define "discovery" routes as it acts as an assistant to find a path adapted to the user's priorities (leisure, speed, etc.).
Adopted thanks to a practical feature, the application allows users to place the environment at the heart of their daily habits. Users can then contribute their own inputs to the catalog of sites: by photographing and sharing a green space in the city, they participate in its recognition and preservation, thus becoming co-developers of urban biodiversity. Finally, as it is human nature to seek a bit of play in daily life, the application rewards contributors with a "badge" system, valuing user engagement and enhancing recognition of their involvement among peers. With these features, this prototype application, currently only available for the city of Marseille, has been awarded by the PACA region open data competition. This award demonstrates the interest in the intersection of open data and biodiversity.
Biodiversity goes to Open Data
This growing interest should certainly inspire other developers to expand this approach to other communities in France and Europe. Indeed, for communities, this type of tool can be a way to enhance their investments in roadways and urban infrastructure, promote their environmental heritage, and distinguish themselves through a continuous search for creativity. Such differentiation and diversification will likely be encouraged by the increasing amount of environmental data collected every day: for example, more than 5,000 data points are added daily to the national inventory of natural heritage of the National Museum of Natural History. With the rise of participatory sciences[2]<, strengthened by associative networks and natural space networks, there has never been so much environmental data available. This opens up a very wide field for the development of new awareness tools as well as decision-making aids on biodiversity issues.
A movement that is further amplified by the recent decree regarding the national inventory of natural heritage. This decree enhances the openness of biodiversity data to "move beyond the circle of enthusiasts to make these issues accessible to the general public," explains Barbara Pompili, Secretary of State for Biodiversity, on the occasion of the decree's publication.[3]
Encouraging developers to use data
"There is no point in opening up data if we do not encourage citizens to take ownership of it," could be the motto of initiatives like La Greentech, a project of the Ministry of the Environment, Energy, and the Sea, which has just concluded its second call for projects aimed at encouraging the development of innovative applications for energy transition and green growth. 51 projects are winners, 51 start-ups among the 130 that applied, covering themes related to biodiversity.
Among the awardees were the applications Bio Sentinel, using augmented reality technology to inform the public and involve businesses and communities in promoting biodiversity in their area; and Terrazul, a web and mobile platform for tracking the ecological footprint of agricultural activities. As these examples show, and with the increasing use of hackathons (see hackBiodiv) in developing solutions to environmental issues, the opening of data to a growing and diverse number of users and developers accelerates the emergence of new applications. These may transform our interactions with biodiversity just as others have changed our eating habits (via open data applications, short supply chains are becoming increasingly accessible) or energy practices, where open data allows for the collective optimization of solar installations (OpenSolarMap) and improves the energy strategies of territories (ENERGIF ROSE). Yes, the opening of data enables the emergence of digital tools that promote the transition to more ecological, virtuous, and positive behaviors!
The perspective of Vertigo Lab: from digital to action
Through its many missions, Vertigo Lab observes, catalogs, and draws inspiration from new digital uses to serve a transition economy. The studies conducted on waste reduction, valorization of ecosystem services, and territorial climate-air-energy plans present numerous opportunities for the use of open data or broader access to available data. This is an area where Vertigo Lab is ready to take action!
References
- [1] My Garden in the City is downloadable from the app's website: http://www.mon-jardin-en-ville.fr/.
- [2] See, for example, the Biolit project from planetemer.org where environmental observations from citizens, researchers, schools, and their students are gathered to better protect the marine environment, or the Oboradar project, a participatory mapping of jellyfish observations in Spain http://oboradar.com/
- [3] Read: The data from impact studies on biodiversity: soon to be freely accessible – actuenvironnement.com
