Objectives

DiMDiCi is a pilot-project within COESO.

The main objective of the DiMDiCi project is to engage a group of people with cognitive disabilities in the co-design of an inclusive digital collaborative mapping tool in order to accommodate their participation and views in the design of walkable and accessible (semi-) public space for all.

The following research questions are guiding the research:

1) How to engage people with disabilities in the participatory planning of walkable neighbourhoods?

2) How to design a digital collaborative mapping tool that can be used by people with cognitive disabilities?

Answering these two questions will help to understand how to make citizen science in the context of healthy urban development more inclusive and how to empower people with disabilities as well as researchers and urban planners to participate in citizen science research.

We follow this objective as citizen science projects need to become more inclusive and engage a broader diversity of citizens in the creation of new knowledge. While the ECSA working group Empowerment, Inclusiveness & Equity demands to broaden diversity and inclusiveness of citizen science research and explicitly names people with cognitive disabilities as a target group, this community is hardly represented in citizen science projects up to now.

Partners

In the DiMDiCi project, we work transdisciplinarily in co-design with different partners from science and practice on the city of Herne, Germany.

HS-Gesundheit, Department of Community Health: Prof. Dr. habil. Heike Köckler, Professor on Place & Health, is an urban planner by profession and develops the Lab for Digital Participatory Spatial Analysis as a lab within the field of Citizen Science on Urban Health. Prof. Dr. Christian Walter-Klose, Professor on Disability, Studies and Inclusion, is a psychologist with a special focus on the development and creation of social systems in the context of disability. Julia Brüggemann is a social scientist by profession researching participation formats with disabled people. Myriam Vittinghoff is health scientist and supporting development of digital tools.

UT-ITC, Department of Urban and Regional Planning and Geo-information Management : Prof. Dr. Karin Pfeffer, Chair in Infrastructuring Urban Futures, investigates how urban governance actors develop, organize and practice access to urban infrastructure. Dr. Johannes Flacke, Assistant Professor Spatial Planning and Decision Support Systems, has ample experience in conceptualising and developing collaborative planning support tools and their application and evaluation in stakeholder workshops applying agile and human-centred design methods. He is the head of the Design and Interactive Space for Co-creating (DISC,). The UT-ITC researchers have developed the mapping platform OGITO that is the basis for the digital mapping tool to be developed in the project.

The Wittekindshof is a welfare trust that advises and supports people with diverse disabilities and their relatives in different phases of their lives. Their houses are spread over the selected case study area, the city of Herne. This makes studying activities in semi-public space of people living in Wittekindshof possible.

The city of Herne (Health Department and Department of Urban Planning) participates actively in the project to utilize the knowledge gained in the sectoral plan for health promotion.

Figure 1 shows the complementary skills of each team member contributing to the objectives.

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