The Municipality of Santa Maria da Feira creates a digital platform to promote participatory democracy

The Digital Platform for Participatory Democracy is one of the measures to be implemented within the scope of the European project Active Citizens, Integrated Action Plan, in which the Municipality of Santa Maria da Feira is a partner, and has been designed since April of this year with the contributions of children, youth, adults and seniors from Feira community. The objective is for this new participatory democracy tool to come into operation by the end of this year and be integrated into the Citizen One Stop Shop, which will concentrate all areas of municipal service in the same space, guaranteeing citizens access to all municipal information and support.

Citizen One Stop Shop will be the focal point for citizens and will be enriched with the aggregation of initiatives planned by citizens within the URBACT Local Group in the scope of the Active Citizens Integrated Action Plan.

Other outstanding actions that this space will host and encourage will be:

1. CocriaLab: aims to coordinate and increase participatory democracy actions/experiments in the territory, a space for proposals rather than protests, a space for innovation and collective co-creation. It will be a citizen innovation laboratory, whose nature will be informal, collaborative, creative where the voice of the citizen is heard and considered for problem solving and construction of an inclusive, sustainable and resilient territory; it will favour multidisciplinary and multisectoral knowledge production characterized by hospitality, and composed of heterogeneous local agents;

2. City hall open day: open the city hall doors to citizens by organizing guided visits to the different departments, in order to make citizens aware of the internal flow of council’s processes and favour transparency;

3. Mobile citizenship lab: a van equipped with urban planning information that will do itinerary tours around the 21 parishes to meet citizens in the field to inform, listen and record the opinion of citizens on a given space/requalification/theme, normally visualizing the territory in a 10 years future length period;

4. A partnership with Aveiro University to promote training on how citizens can participate actively at local, national and European level. As well as promote information and training for technicians, citizens and policy makers on how to involve citizens in local field experimentations with the final aim to promote motivation for citizen participation and involvement in territory planning: what do I want and how to I want to live in this territory? 

5. Awareness campaigns in schools, radio and social media for diffusion of projects and actions using several communication channels to reach out to a greater number of people and root participatory democracy in citizens hearts;

6. International partnerships to promote participatory democracy, foster best practices exchange, peer learning and international cooperation in the field of participatory democracy.

Led by the French city of Agen and financed by the URBACT program (85 percent ERDF contribution), Active Citizens is made up of a network of eight small and medium-sized European cities – Santa Maria da Feira (Portugal), Bistrita (Romania), Cento (Italy), Dinslaken (Germany), Hradec Kralové (Czech Republic), Saint Quentin (France) and Tartu (Estonia) – created to help address the challenges of local governance, in particular the promotion of participatory democracy.