CitiObs (Enhancing Citizen Observatories for healthy, sustainable, resilient, and inclusive cities) is a Horizon Europe project. It was launched on the 1st of January 2023 and will run for four years. CitiObs will support Citizen Observatories (COs) in distinct cities to create, enhance or scale up inclusive and diverse COs. The goal is to encourage citizens to take an active role in the observation of their urban environment using low-cost sensor technologies and wearables to monitor air quality and related environmental measures.

CitiObs provides a set of tools and methodologies that enables COs to better transform co-created data into knowledge suitable for integration into relevant policy and decision-making processes.

The CitiObs co-design and co-creation activities will be implemented along with citizen science practitioners and policy makers at city, regional, national and EU-level. In addition, the project team will develop an online Knowledge Platform containing the results of those activities. Part of this will be a detailed CitiObs Cookbook, guiding users to relevant CitiObs tools in order to address their specific COs’ challenges.

The platform will include public documentation, guidelines, and other materials. It will also include media materials developed within the project and made easily accessible for future use. Also, CitiObs will provide tools and guidance on how to use low-cost sensors and automatically validate real-time data remotely. The data from the COs will be part of GEOSS portal community, and will be visualized to support taking decisions and creating local actions.

CitiObs aims to achieve:

• More widespread, diverse, inclusive and stable participation of citizens and communities in the observation, monitoring, and protection of the urban environment via Citizen Observatories (COs).
• Greater temporal and spatial availability of citizen observations to complement official observations at local, national and EU institution level for policy and research use.
• Stronger recognition of COs as a powerful research and policy-making approach on observation, monitoring and protection of the urban environment. COs are especially useful in addressing urban challenges related to pollution and climate change mitigation and adaptation.
• Large scale demonstration of CitiObs tools and approaches for enhancing COs.

CitiObs will support and leverage existing COs, communities of practice and knowledge networks, and replicate and scale-up state-of-the-art methodologies and practices to integrate COs in multi-level governance across all corners of Europe. Our goal is to achieve better informed decision-making processes, societal engagement and innovation. Furthermore, with the use of the tools and approaches included in the CitiObs Cookbook, the project team expect that the number of citizens monitoring the environment and providing validated data on the environmental state will be increased. This will again lead to the creation of more targeted and informed local, national and EU level policies. CitiObs will give each participating city the opportunity to further understand their challenge and needs, and to gain support from the tools and methods which are to be created during the project.

The demonstration and validation of the CitiObs tools and approaches for enhancing COs is one of the key activities of the project. It also defines and shapes the overall approach and methodology used.

To ensure broad use, the CitiObs tools and approaches will be developed in co-creation with COs in 5 Frontrunner cities, Athens, Barcelona, Dublin, Kristiansand and Rotterdam. These Frontrunner cities will provide valuable inputs from their experience with different tools and methods, which will then be finetuned in collaboration with 30 Implementer cities. Finally, the tools will be showcased to 50 Fellow cities. An open call will be done to find interested Implementer and Fellow cities during the second year of the project.

In January 2023, the CitiObs consortium launched the project in the kick-off meeting that was held in Oslo. During that time, the partners exchanged their innovative ideas and past experiences relevant to the project’s objectives. In June 2023, the CitiObs consortium will hold the second face-to-face plenary meeting with the focus on onboarding the Frontrunner cities.