An essential prerequisite for sustainable development is that it unfolds from within and is supported by local communities. The OPUSH project aims to make knowledge on sustainable development and transformative action more visible and traceable and empower the local community by granting access to and interaction with open knowledge ecosystems. Thereby, OPUSH enhances the role and capacity of libraries within Open Science and through Citizen Science as a driver of sustainable development.
The project focuses on the most heterogeneous groups of civil society, particularly the empowerment of marginalized groups, the equal inclusion of all genders, and the inclusion of people regardless of their cultural or social backgrounds and people with different needs to support the development of cities and urban areas. Thus, the project pursues the following approaches:
–  Identifying challenges in establishing sustainability-oriented learning settings.
– Developing, testing and evaluating new combined analogue and digital approaches to unfold knowledge co-production on sustainable development.

The project is strategically engaged for the 2030 Agenda based on UN SDGs by empowering people through education and learning and strengthening transformative action in all agendas, programs, and activities of the urban network shaping new urban innovation ecosystems and providing environmental and social justice for all.

Project results summary (tentative)

Aim and purpose related to the project and to the call

OPUSH is focusing on transformative capacities of research supporting institutions like libraries and museums as open urban sustainability hubs within the urban knowledge ecosystem and notably in the context of UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Open Science policies of the UNESCO and the EU. Understanding the role and the scope of change of these institutions is a point of departure to strengthen their capacities particularly in driving sustainable urban development with citizen science, helping cities to empower local communities by granting permanent access to open knowledge ecosystems with a focus on social and environmental justice.
Corresponding to the ENUTC-Call OPUSH has established social inclusive co-creative processes, produced social robust knowledge, created inclusive public and semi-public spaces, opened up, strengthened and analysed local knowledge ecosystems, developed libraries and museums as urban infrastructures for sustainable urban transformation, enabled digital transitions and strengthened strategic partnerships in national and international networks of citizen science, libraries, museums, architecture and urban planning.

Methods used and experiences that you would like to highlight

The OPUSH team has analysed the open science ecosystem in four partner cities, namely Barcelona, Delft, Tallinn and Vienna, as well as the state-of-the-art intersection between sustainable urban transformation and citizen science, and the skills and competences needed within open urban sustainability hubs (WP 2). On this basis a total of eight citizen science experiments have been prepared and conducted (WP 3) and evaluated in terms of individual competency development, social learning and inter- and transdisciplinary learning (WP 4). Some pilots have already been successfully transferred to follow-up research. From the outset, the research work was made accessible to citizens and the interested professional public via websites, social media, conferences and publications, and the experiences and results were used for capacity building (WP 5).

Therefore cooperation between science, libraries, museums, city administration, civil society and other stakeholders of urban development have been established in various constellations. Impact on partner cities has been realised through inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge exchange and research action for urban transformation, resulting in local learning processes in the context of ongoing urban planning processes and How to-Guides on Citizen Science Pilots in Barcelona, Delft, Tallinn and Vienna. Impact on national and international R&I policies has been and will be achieved by the engagement of project partners in working groups of national and international networks (IFLA, LIBER, ECSA, EU Citizen Science Platform, CESAER Task Force Openness of Science & Technology, CS-NL network, Civic Engagement Hub, Citizen Science Office Barcelona, Austrian Citizen Science Platform, OeAD-Zentrum for Citizen Science, BBSR Citizen Science etc.), participation to eight scientific conferences and more than twenty public events, engagement in four working groups dedicated to citizen science and open science.

Each of the local citizen science pilots represents a special highlight of OPUSH. They show how diverse and varied participatory urban transformation processes can be and how complex the benefits and added values that individual and institutional participants derive from innovative cooperation can be. Citizens were empowered for urban transformation, and stakeholders and researchers involved expand their skills in the field of open science and citizen science. Some of the striking results are the experiences gained within the promoting teams comprising researchers, library and museum staff members as well as within external stakeholders of urban development and citizens, particularly vulnerable groups like children, youth and older adults. OPUSH allowed the TU Wien library to gain initial experience with citizen science within their new data visualisation space that has been established in 2023 and has also served as a model for the VR/AR visualisation hub ‘Aviko’ (working title) that is being developed at the library of TalTech University.

Experiences of working in the interdisciplinary project

OPUSH immediately created synergies from the collaboration of experts from different scientific disciplines and fields of practice, as well as different experiences and cultures of open scientific work. For example, the Spanish partners from Catalonia contributed their extensive knowledge of citizen science and issues of social justice, the Estonian partners their expertise with digital tools, the partners from the Netherlands their inclusive formats for open science and the Austrian partners their expertise in systematic literature review and urban research.

Overall tentative results that you would like to share to the public

Although the benefits of citizen science for opening up science and society are increasingly recognized, stakeholders in urban development and research performing and supporting institutions such as libraries and museums still have little or no experience with this promising approach. OPUSH has contributed to this open debate in relevant networks and conferences through presentations, working and proceeding papers as well as a systematic literature review (to be published in 2025) and has shown how these actors can expand their knowledge and capacities with concrete measures. In doing so, we have also learned that there are social, institutional and instrumental limits that require further efforts to overcome, as does research into the challenges for the further opening of society and social and environmental justice within urban transformation that we are striving for. This common effort was collectively discussed within the project and will be published in the form of a qualitative paper (to be published in 2025).

Moves in this direction are the Austrian Library Congress 2025, co-organised by TU Wien Library and expected to have over 1,400 participants from Europe, that will contribute to knowledge transfer and the impact of OPUSH in the community of librarians, the opening of the VR/AR visualization hub ‘Aviko’ at the library of TalTech University in summer 2025, the new launch of the regional Civic Engagement Hub as a collaboration between TU Delft, Leiden University, Erasmus University and Erasmus MC, the publication in 2025 of an unprecedented large scale study regarding neighbor’s perception on extreme urban heat in Barcelona Metropolitan Area, done in collaboration with public libraries and the foreseen integration of the methodology in the second edition of the certified Citizen Science Training of Universitat de Barcelona, scheduled for Autumn 2025. OPUSH has been awarded with the OeAD Citizen Science Award in 2023 and with the first place in the research category of the Austrian State Prize for Climate Change Adaptation in 2024.

References

OPUSH Website, https://opush.net/
OPUSH Zenodo repository, https://zenodo.org/communities/opush/