On the day after tomorrow I am taking off to Kopenhagen as one of 1000 other experts coming together for attending the UNLEASH Global Innovation Lab 2017. Right now I am so excited about this great event because this is something I absolutely love: Getting to know impressive people sharing the vision to change the world. Getting to know people being change-makers like me. 1000 excellent people and brilliant minds coming together in order to find solutions on how to fulfil the Sustainable Development Goals defined by the UN.
I am always up for inspirations and new input and I am absolutely sure that I will be inspired and overwhelmed by the great and innovative ideas and prototypes formulated during the lab. It is such a great thing to bring together diverse people from 129 different countries and professional backgrounds working together on special themes in which they have gained profound knowledge and expertise using this to generate and develop something new. This is what the idea of the open innovation process is all about. Collaboration is the key and the focus of my research and work. I am a social scientist from Germany and have studied politics and law. I am working in the field of community building and I am interested in finding answers on how to include citizens in urban planning and decision-making processes. My aim is to increase citizen-engagement and developing an awareness of their own responsibility for their urban space. One example for achieving this is that I am organising placemaking workshops with highschool students in Hamburg but I always try to find new ways in order to involve citizens in urban-decision-making-processes and increasing bottom-up-practices. Therefore I developed a prototype for a kind of citizen-platform which includes all urban stakeholders. Besides I have worked together with some other experts on a mutual project for a german foundation in which we have developed a prototype for a platform putting the citizens into the spotlight who are already active in civic participation. The key sentence is that “urban social innovations are made by its citizens”.
I am looking forward to working with the other SDG talents on new ideas in the field of urban sustainability especially urban citizen engagement and urban public spaces and cannot wait to start :)!
