CoGhent

CoGhent - ©

CoGhent - ©eurocities

CoGhent

Status

completed

City

Ghent

Main actors

City Government, Supranational / Intergovernmental Institutions, Private Sector, Community / Citizen Group, Research Institutes / Universities

Project area

Whole City/Administrative Region

Duration

2020 - 2023

CoGhent – Collections of Ghent – is an initiative that explores the potential of digitised cultural heritage to promote social cohesion and inclusion at the urban level, operating on a co-creative and participatory basis. Collaborating with the citizens of Ghent and five cultural heritage institutions within the city, CoGhent is building a diverse collection. This collection includes archival material, museum objects, and digitised material contributed by citizens themselves. By networking and linking this material, the project aims to increase the accessibility and utilisation of cultural heritage, thereby reducing the barriers to museum engagement. To illustrate the outcomes of this digital collection, various activities have been undertaken in and around the city of Ghent.

Originally published by EUROCITIES: LINK

For further information about the case study, click here.

Sustainable Development Goals

Eurocities Awards

This project was shortlisted for the 'Eurocities Awards' in 2023 in the following category: Taking the step from human global mobility to local community cohesion.

Learn more

City information

City

Ghent, Belgium

Size and population development

The city of Ghent recorded a population of 260,341 in the 2018 census, a + 0.87 change since 2015. The city covers a total area of 156.18km2 with a population density of 1,679 people per km2.

Population composition

The 2018 data shows that the population comprises 50.1% females and 49.9% males. 67.1% of Ghent’s residents are aged between 15-64, 16.7% are aged 65 or over and 16.2% of residents are children aged 0-14. The official language of Ghent is Dutch, sometimes colloquially referred to as Flemish. Ghent has a large number of immigrants, largely from Turkey, Africa (North and sub-Saharan), Asia and Eastern Europe. Projections indicate that Ghent will become a majority-minoirty city by 2040. Ghent hosts a variety of religious communities as well as a large number of atheists and agnostics. Roman Catholicism is the religion with the largest followers, minority faiths include Anglicanism, Islam, Eastern Orthodoxy, Sikhism and Buddhism.

Main functions

Ghent is the capital and largest city of the East Flanders province and the second largest municipality in Belgium after Antwerp. The city lies at the junction of the Lys and Scheldt rivers.

Main industries / business

The port of Ghent, in the north of the city, is the third largest port of Belgium. The port houses many large companies including automotive giant’s - Volvo Cars, Volvo Trucks, Volvo Parks and Honda. Ghent’s other significant economic activities include oil refining and banking, the manufacture of paper, chemicals, and light machinery, horticulture and market gardens and education. Tourism-related businesses are increasingly playing an important role in the local economy, as the density of historic sites renders Ghent an attractive tourist destination.

Sources for city budget

The City of Ghent draws its budget for public expenditure largely from property tax, fees, fines, operating revenues and subsidies from national government of Finland.

Political structure

Governing mayor and deputy mayors govern the city.

Administrative structure

Ghent City Council has 53 members, divided into seven political fractions, the members are directly elected by the citizens of Ghent.

Website

https://stad.gent/

Background and objectives

The main objective of this project is to improve cultural participatory practice using open data and disruptive technology. Specifically, to use shared digitised cultural heritage to initiate conversations, gather previously unknown citizen stories and histories and increase social cohesion and a sense of belonging. This will be achieved through co-creation, co-curation and co-implementation and will help to measure and understand how these participatory projects contribute to social cohesion.

Additional objectives:
Increasing Accessibility: CoGhent is committed to making the city’s shared cultural heritage available to everyone, improving its visibility, accessibility, and utilization. The initiative plans to expand the concept of cultural heritage by incorporating cultural practices that are vibrant within urban communities, such as citizen stories and histories.

Participation and Engagement: CoGhent aims to engage the community in participatory and curiosity-stimulating ways. CoGhent's goal is to open up as much cultural heritage as possible and to maximise its potential across various policy areas like education and tourism.

Data Integration: CoGhent will structure existing data, connect and integrate urban data silos, and collectively share resources to digitise both immaterial and material cultural heritage. By adhering to (FAIR) open data principles, they aim to increase availability, enrichment, interchangeability, and overall reach, thereby improving and encouraging digital collaboration between cultural stakeholders.

Community Connection: CoGhent encourages crowdsourcing to collect new and enrich existing cultural heritage data. The initiative maintains a separation between crowdsourced materials and professional practice to assess what methods are effective, and to validate best practices for motivation, public and community engagement, particularly among underserved audiences.

Scaling the CoGhent Box Concept: CoGhent plans to rescale the CoGhent Box concept to individual museum practice by converging project insights and hardware into a permanent setting in the new wing of Design Museum Gent, set to be completed by 2026. This will serve as a cultural third space for continued collective knowledge creation, transforming the cultural institution into a hub for ideas and co-creation, and bridging the gap between the city and its museum.

Implementation

The CoGhent Box serves as a mobile immersive experience for cultural heritage, deployed in three different neighbourhoods to collect stories and experiences from citizens about their surroundings. This approach is designed to test and validate whether it is a feasible method of bringing cultural heritage collections to the neighbourhoods. During a 10-month testing period, the box resided for three months in each neighbourhood, beginning in Wondelgem in April 2022 and concluding in Tolhuis-Sluizeken-Ham in February 2023. The three neighbourhoods were selected from a total of 25, based on parameters related to social diversity and cultural participation.

In these neighbourhoods, diverse teams worked intensively with local citizens. These teams were composed of community workers, public workers from cultural heritage museums and the Ghent Archive, a policy participation expert, and a historical participation expert from STAM. The latter engaged in uncovering unknown stories about people and places in certain areas, such as 'Wondelgem on Wheels': a tale of nomadic cultures present in the Ghent neighbourhood of Wondelgem.

The project also aims to actively involve all residents of Ghent, not just those in the three testing neighbourhoods. Through a co-creation fund, CoGhent is supporting a total of eight projects focusing on creative reuse, and five projects on the technological reuse of the accessible collection of data. For this purpose, the project has earmarked a total sum of EUR 200,000 to be awarded to the relevant projects. In addition to the necessary financial stimulus, the project includes an operation – the cultural data lab – to encourage the creative reuse of the digital collection and infrastructure. This initiative serves to organize knowledge dissemination from the project to the broader heritage sector and to promote active formats like hackathons and low-threshold initiatives centered around creative reuse, such as workshops for creating GIFs with cultural heritage.

Hack the Box – a hackathon – was organized on October 15th, 2022, with 137 participants and 31 visitors. During this hackathon, participating teams were challenged to develop prototypes of new products and services, built upon the assets developed in the CoGhent project (transforming, reinterpreting, mashing it up, and tinkering). Most of the participants were higher education students from three main higher education institutes, but some professional teams also participated. This resulted in 28 solutions. Prizes were awarded for the best overall concept (an AR application to follow stories and objects on an aerial map), best creative application (a table-based tangible interface that allows users to "feel" the heritage artefacts using texture and sound), best technical application (a command-line interface that produces ASCII versions of heritage objects based on object descriptions), the prize of the public (a paint-like drawing-based search engine to explore the collection), and a kids' prize (an immersive experience time machine room to explore heritage, based on ancient maps of the city).

The technology will be secured after June 2023 by the Krook (the main library and knowledge hub for culture and innovation in the City of Ghent) and by the cultural heritage museums and archives. These institutions will display the CoGhent Box interfaces until the new wing of the Design Museum Ghent is ready to receive visitors in 2026. Public workers from museums, community workers, participation workers, etc., will explore how new stories can be assembled and communicated after June 2023.

This three-year project, which commenced in July 2020, concluded in June 2023. The findings were widely disseminated at the CoGhent Festival, held on the 2nd and 3rd of June 2023, to an audience comprising both professionals and citizens.

Financing and resources

The Collections of Ghent consortium consists of a 'quadruple helix' of 13 partners. To address complex urban and digital challenges, the City of Ghent consistently seeks a balanced ecosystem of partners from government institutions, academia, companies, and civil-society organizations within specific fields of expertise. This approach aligns with the city’s ambition to ‘dare to innovate together.’ The consortium collaborates under the leadership of the City of Ghent, involving seven city services (Data and Information, Culture, Communication, Strategic Funding, Meeting and Connecting, Policy Participation).

The 8th city service, Ghent Archive, along with 4 Ghent museums—Design Museum Gent, Huis Van Alijn (Museum of Daily Life), Industrymuseum, and STAM—form the cultural heritage institutions involved. These Ghent cultural heritage institutions are exploring digital systems to make their heritage collections scalable and to facilitate connections with each other and with citizens in various Ghent neighbourhoods.

Three research groups from Ghent University are also partners. MICT-UGent for the research coordination, exploratory research, as well as research on the social impact of this project. Complemented by IDlab-UGent or the technical research and the set-up of the APIs and IDLab-UGent Techno Economics for the economical and business research.

Three research groups from Ghent University are also partners: MICT-UGent for research coordination and exploratory research, as well as the social impact assessment of this project, complemented by IDlab-UGent for technical research and the set-up of the APIs, and IDLab-UGent Techno Economics for economic and business research.

Flemish companies are also well-represented for the project's more technical work. Production company Fisheye is responsible for constructing the CoGhent Box and the entire physical experience, Inuits as a software company for the various digital systems and all the interfaces with which citizens interact. Studio Dott, a product design agency, provided all the designs visitors interact with, and Chase Creative is offering digital storytelling expertise around this shared cultural heritage.

In addition, two civil society organisations are closely involved: iDrops, as a social innovation partner, developing inclusive tools and methods to bridge cultural heritage, neighborhood activation, and digital assets; and Meemoo, the Flemish Archive Institute, contributing its expertise on underlying cultural data management and various standards.

Bringing so many partners together creates complexity and the need for clear consultation structures, but also offers many interdisciplinary opportunities and access to different types of knowledge and specific skills. It is a partnership where the course taken is collaboratively determined and supported by all.

Results and impacts

Number of objects on collections.gent : 70,000 objects online (the aim is 100,000 objects by June 2023)
Number of new heritage stories in the CoGhent Box: 20

CoGhent utilizes online media channels, such as Facebook and Instagram, to share heritage content in various social formats to engage both citizens and potential visitors. Below are some insights into the number of people we reach through these platforms.

The hackathon attracted 137 active participants, primarily comprising students and companies specializing in technical fields, but also including individuals with expertise in product design and cultural studies. In addition to the hackathon, the project included the development and validation of a measurement instrument to assess the impact of the CoGhent Box at the neighbourhood level. This phase involved three workshops with 24 participants. Additionally, policy research was conducted through focus groups, comprising two focus groups on non-technological aspects and two focus groups with decision-makers within the city and museums, specifically concentrating on non-technological aspects.

Some data on social cohesion

CoGhent Box was active for 3 months in these neighbourhoods:

Wondelgem: 964 participants
Watersportbaan-Ekkergem: 656 participants
Sluizeken-Tolhuis-Ham: 600 participants

Total: 2220 participants in a 10-month testing period.

123 participants participated in the CoGhent social art project ‘tasttoe’ in the neighbourhood Watersportbaan.

Research is being conducted on the effects of digital cultural heritage use on city and regional policies with respect to social cohesion. One significant outcome will be the development of a unified vision for digital image management within the Ghent Group, comprising the City of Ghent, its four museums, and District09. Another substantial achievement is the creation and testing of a methodology to engage neighbourhoods and specific target groups around cultural heritage, with an emphasis on enhancing social cohesion. In addition, a cultural participation toolkit has been developed that underwent further refinement during the CoGhent Festival in June 2023.

Barriers and challenges

One unexpected difficulty was the pandemic; many activities and actions were postponed because of it, which shortened our time to test the CoGhent Box in the neighbourhoods.cultural heritage in their neighbourhood.

The planned three months for each neighbourhood is too short. Foremost, there is a need to build a trusting relationship with these groups to ensure their engagement with the project.

A further difficulty is related to the recent financial recession due to the pandemic. Many European cities, including the City of Ghent, are struggling financially. Because of this, the projects needs to be creative to ensure its sustainability for the coming years. The plan is to further investigate how all lessons, at all levels (such as technology, working with target groups around cultural heritage), can be broadly communicated and shared.

Lessons learned and transferability

CoGhent did not focus on current museum goers, but mainly on new, potential, and unserved audiences residing in different Ghent neighbourhoods. The City of Ghent and its cultural institutions wanted to explore how social cohesion at the neighbourhood level could be improved through the perspective of cultural heritage. They aimed to use heritage to showcase how a neighbourhood evolved, its history, its relation to other cultures, and what it might lack in diversity today.

This approach invites residents who have lived a lifetime in a neighbourhood to look back into the past and share their story. It also allows newcomers to gain a deeper understanding of the origins of the neighbourhood where they now reside, and how it may relate to their own respective backgrounds and stories.

Ethnically and culturally diverse residents are given the opportunity to share their stories on a sustainable technological platform, becoming part of Ghent’s growing heritage collection. The team behind CoGhent noticed enthusiasm among specific groups, such as people in poverty and those from countries like Turkey and Morocco, to share their cultural heritage and stories with other city residents.

Recent immigrants from Ukraine participated in CoGhent's activity in the last neighbourhood, finding through this project a way to connect to and engage with their neighbours. People living together in a high-rise social building got to know each other in new ways: through their own stories. Elderly individuals shared how things used to be, while newcomers recounted tales of their homelands.

Rather than using history and cultural heritage to separate us from each other, we used it to unite ourselves and to broaden each other's perspectives.

References

Project from Co-creation Fund: Neighbourhood store without profit https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2023/01/30/buurtwinkel-zonder-winst-opent-in-volkswijk-gent-nood- aan-ontmo/

Citizens say goodbye with a bang from their outdoor swimming pool https://www.hln.be/gent/gentenaars-nemen-afscheid-van-openluchtzwembad-neptunus-en-kijken-uit- naar-nieuw-overdekt-zwembad-met-beweegbare-bodem~a92e6290/

100,000 museum pieces available to all https://www.nieuwsblad.be/cnt/dmf20220316_93933165