Grow Your Green City

Grow Your Green City is an international campaign creating awareness of the fundamental role played by urban green.

Grow Your Green City is committed to the idea that a Smart City should be a climate-conscious city, exploring how digital and media technologies can contribute to address urban climate adaptation and water-conscious urban development, strengthening and promoting sustainability cultures.

Workshop Grow Your Green City @ Floriade Expo 2022, Almere, The Netherlands, 25 February 2021

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Grow Your Green City

The aim of Grow Your Green City is to enable and promote digitally supported participatory climate adaptation and mitigation and greening strategies for a water-conscious city. Grow Your Green City fosters citizens’ engagement in greening the city, providing a space for co-creation, bringing together expert knowledge and lay people experience, enabling citizens to inter-actively engage and develop visions of their green city.

Cultural legacy and ecological richness

Collecting, preserving, and propagating traditional local botanical knowledge as cultural heritage is ever more compelling, as the latter is threatened by accelerated urbanization, climate change, and loss of biodiversity. Grow your Green City documents, safeguards, and passes on the global cultural legacy and ecological richness, placing a strong emphasis on its cultural dimension.

Green prototyping

Grow Your Green City creates digital solutions for the participatory development of urban green that can be replicated and further implemented in international contexts, at various scales. A prototype is to be developed as a Smart City collaboration between a Dutch city/metropolitan region and a German counterpart while supporting a (Growing) Green Smart City strategy for other cities in the world. The project is promoted through the international Floriade partners network as a scalable best practice, to be replicated for Growing Green Cities.

Green gamified

Consisting of an international awareness campaign promoting Floriade’s engagement in Growing Green Cities, Grow Your Green City could include an Applied Game online platform; a participatory digital encyclopedia of botanic cultural histories; (hybrid/online) workshops, involving international experts, students, practitioners, decision makers, and citizens at different international locations and at Floriade; a spatial hub at Floriade, communicating in an engaging and immersive way the project to visitors.

Digitally supported intergenerational exchange

The Internet-based setup of the project allows to reach out to an international audience. As its digital format is attractive and familiar to a younger audience, the project develops educational material compatible with school curricula. By collecting local traditional botanical knowledge, it relies on the experience of more mature generations, making the project inclusive and engaging for a broad range of age groups. The project addresses a very broad range of target-groups internationally: general public (from young children to senior citizens), experts and students, decision-makers such as policymakers, planners, citizens as well as practitioners.

UN SDGs reloaded

By focusing on the UN SDGs “11: Sustainable Cities and Communities”, “13: Climate Action”, “15: Life on Land”, and “17: Partnerships for the Goals” and contributes also to SDGs “2: Zero Hunger”, “3: Good Health and Well-being”, “5: Gender Equality”, “Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitation”, “10: Reduced Inequalities”, Grow Your Green City makes them relevant to the urban environment, striving for a practice-oriented approach.

Glocal sustainability cultures

Thanks to its interactive setup, Grow Your Green City encourages mutual learning processes locally and internationally. The project contributes to the cross-bridging between players committed to the development of urban green and cultural institutions and initiatives, bringing together expertise and individual competences, various sectors and thinking to promote a culture of sustainability.

Collaboration

Grow your Green City is committed to genuinely inclusive urban sustainability and developed as a collaboration between Hybrid Space Lab and Floriade Expo 2022.

Community

Eric Aangeenbrug, Program Secretary Green Blue, Municipality of Almere
Sytse Berends, Representative of the Green City Foundation, The Netherlands
Dr. Hanna Bornholdt, Scientific Consultant, Landscape Architect, Department of Landscape Planning and Urban Green, City of Hamburg
Xander de Bruine, Program Manager Knowledge Program, Floriade Expo 2022
Britta Döbert, Division for Trade Fairs, German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture
Dina El Filali, Program Manager Floriade International Research Program, Floriade Expo 2022
Egbert Fransen, Director Pakhuis de Zwijger, Amsterdam
Yuori Goudsmit, Economic Department, City of Amsterdam
Dr. David Grawe, Meteorologist, Deputy Head of Mesoscale and Microscale Modelling Group, CEN, Meteorological Institute, University of Hamburg
Elisabeth de Jonge, Program Manager Floriade Education Program, Floriade Expo 2022
Dagmar Keim, Projectleader “Amsterdam at the Floriade 2022”, International/European Manager & Senior Policy Advisor Spatial Planning, City of Amsterdam
Annelies Kieboom, Marketing Director Mobilane
Prof. Jörg Knieling, Professor Urban Planning and Regional Development, HafenCity University Hamburg
Christoph Kober, Director Key Account Management, Hamburg Invest
Christiane Krüger, Director for the German Garden at the Floriade Expo 2022 on behalf of the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture
Mathias Kuhlmann, EU Innovation Consult Hamburg, Senior Funding Expert
Katrien Ligt, Founder and Director of Hamburg Hoch, organisation that stimulates and celebrates rooftop use in Hamburg
Dr. Joachim Ludewig, Deputy General Commissioner for the German Contribution to the Floriade Expo 2022, Division for Trade Fairs, German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture
Fotini Mavromati, Art Commissioner, German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt)
Femke Meijer, Advisor Agriculture Attaché Network, Netherlands Embassy Berlin
Annemieke van Schaik, Senior Director International Participants, Floriade Expo 2022
Leon Smet, Secretary of the Green City Foundation, The Netherlands
Sven Stimac, Chief Operations Officer, Floriade Expo 2022
Prof. Antje Stokman, Professor Architecture and Landscape, HafenCity University Hamburg
Sacha Stolp, Program Climate Adaptation, City of Amsterdam
Mona Treude, Economist, Research Unit Urban Transitions, Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy
Peter Vermeij, Agricultural Counsellor, Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Germany
Mayte de Vries, Strategic Advisor Sustainability Municipality of Almere
Hayo Wagenaar, CEO IJsfontein Interactive Media B.V. / IJsfontein Interactive Media GmbH
Inga Wellmann, Head of Arts and Creative Industries, Ministry of Culture and Media, Hamburg
Quirine Winkler, Program Manager Floriade Innovation Program, Floriade Expo 2022

Embassy Lab is a prototype for experimenting with future functions of embassies in the current age of EUization, globalization and digitalization.

Embassy Lab Grow Your Green City is developed by Hybrid Space Lab together with the Embassy of the Kingdom of The Netherlands Embassy in Berlin and Kingdom of The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague.

Workshops, Lectures & Symposiums Embassy Lab @ Kingdom of The Netherlands Embassy, Berlin, Germany & Kingdom of The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Hague, The Netherlands, 2014~2021

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