Projects
Connecting Nature
Connecting Nature is a €11.4m five-year project funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Innovation Action Programme. With 30 project partners from industry, local authorities, local communities, NGO’s and research in 16 countries, and hubs in Brazil, China, Korea & The Caucasus (Georgia and Armenia), Connecting Nature aimed to position Europe as a global leader in the innovation and implementation of nature –based solutions.
The project’s approach was to form a community of cities that fosters peer to peer learning and capacity building among a set of front runner cities (Genk, Glasgow, and Poznan) who are experienced in delivering large scale nature-based solutions, and a set of fast follower cities (A Coruna, Burgas, Ioannina, Malaga, Nicosia, Pavlos Melas, and Sarajevo) who have the desire to implement large scale nature-based solutions but lack the expertise.
Across the project’s timeframe (2017-2022) project partners developed policy and practices necessary to scale up urban resilience, innovation and governance using nature-based solutions – all of these were underpinned by the co-created Connecting Nature Framework. Fostering the development of co-operation between local governments, SME’s, academic research and community stakeholders, Connecting Nature established the conditions for innovative and new methodologies to spring forth.
One of these methodologies was the development of an arts-based co-creation engagement process, The Sarajevo Pathway, to help cities better communicate the impact of nature-based solutions. From this initial aim, the co-production process has evolved to offer cities a space to design and deliver a meaningful co-production process that draws on both the tangible and intangible elements that comprise peoples’ lived experiences and stories.
The Sarajevo Pathway is a Co-creative, arts-based engagement process that has been developed within the Connecting Nature project (2017-2022). Its name reflects its co-creative character as it was initially piloted and tested in Sarajevo in March 2020. It was then taken to Nicosia where it went through a similar co-creative process and was delivered in September 2020. The Sarajevo Pathway uses several methods and is designed to establish (or re-establish) connections with nature within cities. As each of the cities within the Connecting Nature project worked towards their own Nature-based solution exemplars, the process aimed to revitalize connections to nature and provide a useful tool for engagement.
INTERLACE Project
Following up on the successful two-day Sarajevo Pathway Workshop that was delivered as part of the Connecting Nature Roadshow, EMPath Director Dimitra Xidous was invited by INTERLACE partner Chemnitz-Stad to deliver two Sarajevo Pathway workshops.
The first workshop was delivered as part of the INTERLACE Annual Consortium meeting.
The second workshop was delivered during the Cities Talk Nature Conference. The theme of the workshop was “What nature means to us”.
Key reflections from the workshop
Participants reflected on the effectiveness of the workshop to ‘slow them down’ to reflect in a meaningful manner about their lived experiences related to nature. Many were surprised, in a positive way, about how quickly they were able to move into a space where they shared deeply important and meaningful experiences from their lives with others.
Participants appreciated the combination of methods used to draw out lived experiences; being able to express both text-based and visual aspects of the lived experience provided a natural way to see the shift from the individual to the collective experience(s) of nature.
Language is a powerful tool for expressing ourselves in the world; how this played out in the workshop: while the workshop was conducted in English, participants were invited to write their texts in their mother-tongues (if that felt more natural to them). In relaying their texts back to the group, it was clear that the mother-tongue of many of the participants held and convey much more emotion than when they expressed themselves in English.
To foster more meaningful engagement and commitment towards the long-term engagement of communities in NBS, there is a need to understand and recognize the value of emotional language, and to consider it as an equal alongside the more technical language that is used when discussing NBS.