Periodic Reporting for period 4 - CoCi (Co-Evolving City Life)
Reporting period: 2025-04-01 to 2025-09-30
The “Co-Evolving City Life” (CoCi) project explores a new paradigm in which smart technologies and smart citizens synergistically and seamlessly work together. Within networks of participatory cities, the project explores how citizens empowered by digital assistance can make significant contributions to a better future.
The main questions of the CoCi project are: How could more participatory smart cities work, and how can they simultaneously meet the requirements of being more efficient, sustainable, and resilient? How and when can decentralized approaches compete with or outperform centralized approaches? How could digital societies based on values such as freedom, equality, and solidarity look like, thereby fitting our culture, and what performance is expected from them?
The objective of the CoCi project is to develop, test, and demonstrate new concepts for more resilient, sustainable, and participatory cities, in which activities of various actors are digitally assisted and coordinated, using principles such as self-organization and co-evolution.
The main questions of the CoCi project are: How could more participatory smart cities work, and how can they simultaneously meet the requirements of being more efficient, sustainable, and resilient? How and when can decentralized approaches compete with or outperform centralized approaches? How could digital societies based on values such as freedom, equality, and solidarity look like, thereby fitting our culture, and what performance is expected from them?
The objective of the CoCi project is to develop, test, and demonstrate new concepts for more resilient, sustainable, and participatory cities, in which activities of various actors are digitally assisted and coordinated, using principles such as self-organization and co-evolution.
By the end of the project, all planned deliverables and milestones were successfully completed. The experimental studies, participatory deployments, software demonstrators, and dissemination activities progressed according to the Description of Action, with each work package achieving its scheduled outputs.
To complement the experimental work, the team developed a custom air quality measurement device and carried out real-world deployments as part of a participatory research initiative. This included a series of co-creation workshops and data-sharing events designed to involve citizen scientists in the collection and interpretation of environmental data. The public-facing component was further highlighted through collaboration with Citizen Science Zurich at Scientifica 2023, Switzerland’s largest science festival. Held on September 2–3, 2023, the event drew more than 20,000 visitors and served as a platform to communicate the relevance and impact of citizen-involved research.
The team also hosted the Participatory Resilience Hackathon at ETH Zurich as an educational block course. This initiative brought together students and external participants in a highly interactive format to explore practical applications of participatory system design and computational social science.
In parallel, the CoCi project supported high-level reflection and interdisciplinary exchange through the organization of multiple thematic workshops. These included the Twin Workshop on ``Ethics of Smart Cities and Smart Societies" at ETH Zurich and the Co-Creating the Future: Participatory Cities and Digital Governance event in Vienna, co-organized with the Complexity Science Hub. Most recently, the project contributed to the Back to the Future workshop in February 2025, an international forum that examined the evolution of digital, data-driven, and AI-enhanced cities. The event emphasized critical themes such as complexity, collective intelligence, digital twins, agency, and co-evolution, and provided a space for integrative, future-oriented dialogue on urban governance.
To support experimentation and model validation, the team developed several open-source software tools and interactive applications.
These include a realistic and empirically validated digital twin of traffic in the urban area of Barcelona, as well as an immersive virtual-reality traffic scenario designed for behavioral studies in mixed environments. A separate demonstrator tool was built to evaluate and compare the performance of machine learning-based and self-organization-based traffic signal control strategies. This interactive tool provides both quantitative metrics and qualitative visualizations, enabling researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders to assess trade-offs under different conditions.
The CoCi team has also actively contributed to scientific dissemination through the publication of peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.
In parallel, members of the CoCi team have taken leadership roles in organizing special issues in international journals, furthering interdisciplinary dialogue on CoCi’s core themes.
A MOOCs-style course has also been prepared to support capacity building and broader engagement with the project’s research topics.
These outcomes reflect the project’s commitment to scientific excellence, open science, and societal impact.
To complement the experimental work, the team developed a custom air quality measurement device and carried out real-world deployments as part of a participatory research initiative. This included a series of co-creation workshops and data-sharing events designed to involve citizen scientists in the collection and interpretation of environmental data. The public-facing component was further highlighted through collaboration with Citizen Science Zurich at Scientifica 2023, Switzerland’s largest science festival. Held on September 2–3, 2023, the event drew more than 20,000 visitors and served as a platform to communicate the relevance and impact of citizen-involved research.
The team also hosted the Participatory Resilience Hackathon at ETH Zurich as an educational block course. This initiative brought together students and external participants in a highly interactive format to explore practical applications of participatory system design and computational social science.
In parallel, the CoCi project supported high-level reflection and interdisciplinary exchange through the organization of multiple thematic workshops. These included the Twin Workshop on ``Ethics of Smart Cities and Smart Societies" at ETH Zurich and the Co-Creating the Future: Participatory Cities and Digital Governance event in Vienna, co-organized with the Complexity Science Hub. Most recently, the project contributed to the Back to the Future workshop in February 2025, an international forum that examined the evolution of digital, data-driven, and AI-enhanced cities. The event emphasized critical themes such as complexity, collective intelligence, digital twins, agency, and co-evolution, and provided a space for integrative, future-oriented dialogue on urban governance.
To support experimentation and model validation, the team developed several open-source software tools and interactive applications.
These include a realistic and empirically validated digital twin of traffic in the urban area of Barcelona, as well as an immersive virtual-reality traffic scenario designed for behavioral studies in mixed environments. A separate demonstrator tool was built to evaluate and compare the performance of machine learning-based and self-organization-based traffic signal control strategies. This interactive tool provides both quantitative metrics and qualitative visualizations, enabling researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders to assess trade-offs under different conditions.
The CoCi team has also actively contributed to scientific dissemination through the publication of peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.
In parallel, members of the CoCi team have taken leadership roles in organizing special issues in international journals, furthering interdisciplinary dialogue on CoCi’s core themes.
A MOOCs-style course has also been prepared to support capacity building and broader engagement with the project’s research topics.
These outcomes reflect the project’s commitment to scientific excellence, open science, and societal impact.
Only a very few research teams successfully integrate perspectives from natural sciences, engineering, and the social sciences—including ethics. This project stands out by bridging these disciplines through innovative methodologies such as virtual reality experiments, trust-based sensor calibration, agent-based modeling, and co-creation frameworks to tackle complex urban and societal challenges. Emphasizing ethical, participatory, and decentralized approaches, the project has yielded novel tools and insights in areas such as urban digital twins, sustainable mobility, and collective intelligence.
By the end of the project, these interdisciplinary efforts resulted in operational VR study environments, empirically grounded digital twin simulations, participatory air quality sensing deployments, and demonstrator tools for comparing machine learning–based and self-organization-based traffic control. They also supported the development of participatory governance models, digital democracy tools, co-creation practices, and frameworks for inclusive digital decision-making. Together, these outcomes move beyond the state of the art by providing concrete, validated methods and transferable platforms for building more resilient, democratic, and livable cities.
By the end of the project, these interdisciplinary efforts resulted in operational VR study environments, empirically grounded digital twin simulations, participatory air quality sensing deployments, and demonstrator tools for comparing machine learning–based and self-organization-based traffic control. They also supported the development of participatory governance models, digital democracy tools, co-creation practices, and frameworks for inclusive digital decision-making. Together, these outcomes move beyond the state of the art by providing concrete, validated methods and transferable platforms for building more resilient, democratic, and livable cities.