Nordamerika & Stadgeographie Reimagining Urban Nature in Bergheim-West Through Digital Public Participation
- Duration: October 2025 -
- Program: C-NEWTRAL Doctoral Network funded by the EU’s Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme (Grant Agreement No. 101119603)
- Staff: Yanxia Qiu (Visiting Doctoral Researcher from University College Dublin), Ulrike Gerhard, Finn Maass, Marc Heptig
Bergheim-West is one of the warmest urban blocks in Heidelberg, a condition largely driven by extensive impervious surfaces and limited vegetation cover. These characteristics intensify heat stress while limiting opportunities for biodiversity and everyday contact with nature. Recognising these challenges, Heidelberg's biodiversity planning policy (City of Heidelberg 2021) highlights the need to preserve and enhance biodiversity in inner-city areas, including the potential development of a green corridor in Bergheim-West. This policy direction makes the area a compelling case for exploring how Nature-based Solutions (NbS) and participatory planning can jointly address ecological and social challenges.
This research uses a self-developed digital platform, Urban Nature Together (https://urbannaturetogether.framer.website/), an interactive platform for participant engagement that integrates digital mapping surveys and AR features for biodiverse, green planting. By using this tool for citizen engagement, this research aims to investigate how digital participatory tools can support citizen engagement and biodiversity enhancement in an urban context characterised by limited green infrastructure and high impervious surface coverage.
Citizens are invited to complete the biodiversity perception survey to capture their feelings about current biodiversity and raise their awareness of the surrounding ecological landscape. Moreover, the Augmented Reality (AR) tool allows participants to visualise biodiverse green in public spaces by adding various plants to real spaces, helping them better imagine the post-planting scenarios.
So far, 49 citizens and 16 students have participated in the biodiversity perception survey (Figure 1), and 22 have engaged with the AR-based green design tool (Figure 2). In the coming months, the research will involve more citizens in Bergheim-West to strengthen the dataset and support more robust analysis. In parallel, student participation will be expanded to enable comparative insights across different user groups. Together, these efforts aim to inform more inclusive, data-driven, and nature-positive urban planning strategies.
