World Cities Day 2025: How data can amplify – rather than replace – community voices 

World Cities Day 2025: How data can amplify – rather than replace – community voices 

The 2025 World Cities Day theme, ‘People-centred smart cities’, explores how data and technology can be harnessed to improve urban life while keeping people’s needs centre-stage. Life Critical takes this vision a step further. By giving residents the opportunity and the tools to design, test, and refine solutions that transform their local parks into more climate-resilient spaces that also meet their needs as citizens, the project shows how data can directly power community voices in urban transformation.

As communities around the world face growing climate pressures – from extreme heat to flooding – the World Cities Day call to improve urban life through data-driven solutions must also mean making cities more adaptive and resilient to climate change.

Life Critical responds to this challenge by transforming two local parks in Dordrecht (the Netherlands) and Bradford (UK) into more climate-resilient spaces. What makes these transformations special is how they happen – and who leads them.

In both cities, residents are equipped to collect and analyse climate data from their local parks, using this insight to guide the adaptations put in place and assess their impact.They do this, for example, by measuring the surface temperatures of different areas and tracking how these change as new features are introduced – observing how temperatures drop thanks to the addition of more green and blue infrastructure. 

By asking for local residents’ data-driven feedback of the adaptation measures implemented in their parks, Life Critical shows how technology can be used to amplify people-centred decision-making, rather than replace it. The impact of this approach is two-fold: 

1. Citizens are equipped with deeper knowledge of climate changes – beyond those that can be directly seen or felt in day-to-day life. They also see firsthand the impacts of adaptation measures introduced to tackle these changes, demonstrating that seemingly simple measures, like planting more trees or introducing more water features, can and do have a real impact on temperature increases. 
   
2. The adaptation measures introduced are directly driven by the needs of the community who are consulted at every stage of the park transformations. This means that the park transformations help to tackle climate change, while ensuring that they also address the needs of the local communities using the parks. 

Hear directly from the volunteers who are taking part in this citizen science approach to climate adaptation, and see the transformations already taking place in Wielwijk Park, Dordrecht in the video below:

Want to learn more about how Life Critical is supporting community-driven climate resilience across European green spaces? Read our report on Lessons Learned in the City of Dordrecht and our Guidebook to Climate Resilience Through the Involvement of Local Citizens.