When cities set out strategies to become climate neutral, they may face resistance to the changes that this implies. However, this resistance can be reduced by engaging with people and getting them to participate in designing change. A combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches can nurture one another. It can be a meeting of minds – those of policy makers and those of local communities.

Smart city weeks, hackathons and school visits are bottom-up ways to get people on board with new approaches to combating climate change. A digital storytelling format (PageFlow) captures some of these measures as implemented in the cities of the STARDUST project –Cluj-Napoca (Romania), Derry (UK), Kozani (Greece), Pamplona (Spain), Tampere (Finland) and Trento (Italy) – in their efforts to become climate neutral by 2030 for some, and by 2050 by others.

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