5 years of participatory research – a look back

February 2026 marks the official launch of the second ERDF call (European Regional Development Fund). We were lucky to be part of the first one, through the « Wal-E-Cities » program (2016-2020) that envisioned to boost the development of smart cities throughout Wallonia. Inside this large consortium (4 research centers; 5 universities and 1 institute involved), we were in charge of running participatory research, absolutely essential to make sure that this ambitious development of a « smart territory » would not be carried out without its « smart citizens ».

During those four years of research, together with Dr. Clémentine Schelings, we achieved to develop theoretical frameworks to better implement citizen’s participation (as discussed in the thirteen publications associated with this project, to be discovered here), but also to develop a box of four tools useful to implement participatory processes in a concrete manner. The video below summarizes the content of this « Feel Good Toolkit », while the toolkit itself can be found here.