CityStory: Place-Making through Interactive Citizen-Driven Storytelling

Modern cities are undergoing drastic changes so that the need for sustainability grows. Municipalities are in demand of citizen involvement, but struggle in reaching out to the public to engage in a constructive dialogue and truly embed bottom-up participation in policymaking. Collaborative storytelling is a powerful technique to foster this, but participation platforms, intelligent technologies, legal structures and infrastructure are not soundly orchestrated to fully support this. The CityStory project first and foremost aims to stimulate and help people in the creative endeavor of making a story about their local environment. By experimentation with different tools and interaction methods it aims to design, develop and test various interactive story catchers, addressing a very diverse ‘everyday’ public. A secondary premise of this is that people feel encouraged and empowered to help shape their local environment through constructive dialogue between their fellow citizens and local authorities. Through this, CityStory intends to perform research activities allowing the project partners to gain insights into how collaborative storytelling can be supported through novel technologies. The main objectives of the research are: ● Improving citizen participation in urban projects by using participative storytelling enhanced with artificial intelligence technologies. ● Designing new forms of urban interaction that allow widely accessible and engaging ways of storytelling in public space that are GDPR compliant. ● Exploring future media and verify the value of new media concepts in an urban context.