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Nordic Sustainable Cities is a collaboration with Nordic Innovation. The programme consists of challenge competitions, defining and branding the nordic way of building cities and export efforts of highly advanced solutions for sustainable, liveable and smart cities. In this project create benchmark projects that alliances that base on unique features of the…
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Would you like to become an urban entrepreneur? Below you can find some features of successful ‘urbanpreneurs’ in a new generation smart city, as they have been coined by Boyd Cohen. According to Cohen, urbanpreneurs can prosper if they rethink the ultimate goal of their businesses. According to Boyd Cohen,…
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The real meaning of co-creation and participatory processes is not listening to more opinions and fine-tuning the outcomes accordingly but honestly open-ended deliberation and distributed decision-making on things that matter to us. That is how these processes can bring more democracy in democracy. Outi Kuittinen from Demos Helsinki talks to…
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The European Democracy Shield is a timely and commendable initiative aimed at addressing the EU’s growing democratic challenges. However, it would benefit from a more human-centered approach focusing on citizen participation, civil society engagement, and more nuanced policies on digital regulation.
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This report shares how young people aged 14-19 helped shape Scotland’s Horizon Scanning through a participatory foresight process co-designed with Members of the Scottish Youth Parliament. It reveals insights on young people’s perspectives on topics such as climate, technology, democracy, and society more broadly, and shows how engaging them meaningfully can strengthen anticipatory governance. The methodology offers learnings and tools for governments seeking to embed long-term thinking into policy, and build trust and momentum towards shared large-scale goals.
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The answer isn’t less democracy, but more. New participatory and deliberative processes aimed at involving citizens in decision-making are gaining traction across Europe, but their long-term success depends on how well they are embedded into the public administration and society.
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Europe’s democratic resilience requires introspection, clear-sightedness and reimagination
September 16, 2025
The European Democracy Shield (EUDS) is being prepared to bolster the continent’s democratic resilience. If it isn’t to become one of innumerable democracy initiatives, EU institutions need to be clear-sighted about the causes and stakes of our present moment.
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Imaginaries on Sustainability Transformation – Report outlines three positive futures
May 19, 2025
Imagining futures where society has successfully undergone a sustainability transformation helps us envision a world in which today’s major negative trends have been brought under control. But what kind of positive futures have been proposed in recent years? At the request of the Finnish Expert Panel for Sustainable Development, Demos Helsinki conducted a literature review and drafted three preliminary visions of such futures.
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The anticipatory policy cycle: not just preparing for the future, but influencing it
May 14, 2025
Governments that invest in foresight-driven policymaking are better positioned to shape the conditions that they operate in. This is how to build policies that both anticipate and influence the future.
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