Chapter 15Civic University and Citizen Science

15.1The transformation towards a civic university#

The debate on the role of the university in contemporary society has given rise to an in-depth reflection on its mission and its relationship with the environment. The notion of civic university emerges precisely from this reflection. It is not only a university that trains professionals or produces academic knowledge, but an institution that feels co-responsible for social welfare, that recognizes the capacity of citizens to generate valuable knowledge and that seeks to relate to its territory in a closer and more horizontal way. The civic university opens its doors and its agendas to listen, understand and act together with those who live daily problems. This relies on universities seeing themselves as a University of Place.

This approach is a natural fit for AskingCities. The AskingCities methodology was not born within a university institution, nor does it depend on it to exist. AskingCities is nourished by real needs, stories of people who encounter barriers in complex institutional systems and the willingness to accompany them to improve their access to resources, aid or services. Precisely because AskingCities is not an academic project, the university has the opportunity to participate from a different role: not that of the authority that designs solutions from a distance, but that of the institution that approaches, that provides criteria when necessary and that learns from each case. In AskingCities, the community always retains the leading role, while the university contributes with its capacity for analysis, its social sensitivity and its institutional legitimacy.

The civic university finds in AskingCities an operating model that allows it to become a more open and more sensitive institution to the territory, without the need to create complex structures or additional bureaucratic processes. It is enough to articulate a group of people willing to listen, document and analyze, always with deep respect for the voice of those who live the situations being studied. In this sense, AskingCities does not transform the university from the outside, but offers a space where the university can be transformed from within, recovering its public dimension and its commitment to citizenship.

15.2Citizen Science as a Source of Knowledge AskingCities#

Citizen science, in its recent evolution, has expanded from the traditional spheres of environmental observation or collective measurement to more social and urban forms of knowledge generation. Its fundamental principle is simple but powerful: people, in their daily lives, produce valuable information and can participate meaningfully in research and diagnostic processes. When communities describe their needs, when they narrate the obstacles they encounter, or when they document the impact of an intervention, they are producing a form of evidence that cannot emerge from a laboratory or an administrative office.

AskingCities naturally embodies this logic. Each case recorded, each account of an administrative difficulty and each impact story constitutes a fragment of knowledge that, when brought together, allows us to better understand the real functioning of institutional and social systems. The qualitative evidence generated by AskingCities is nothing more than a central input to analyze processes, identify patterns and propose improvements. AskingCities can thus be understood as a form of applied citizen science, where the community produces knowledge that the university can help structure, interpret and amplify.

This relationship does not imply that the university should intervene as an expert that validates or corrects community knowledge. The role of the university is not to impose criteria, but to accompany the production of evidence, provide it with a framework that allows learning to be extracted and offer analysis tools that respect the lived experience. Citizen science, combined with the AskingCities approach, turns the community into an agent of relevant knowledge, while the university acts as a mediator that helps shape that knowledge so that it is understandable, useful and applicable.

15.3A University's specific contribution to AskingCities#

The university's role within the AskingCities ecosystem is complementary and vital. First, it contributes by providing people who can participate in documentation, accompaniment and analysis tasks. Students, professors and researchers find in AskingCities a space where they can participate in real processes, in direct contact with collectives and with stories that rarely appear in a subject or in conventional academic practice. This participation not only benefits AskingCities, but also brings to university education a dimension of social commitment that is deeply educational.

Secondly, the university provides the capacity for understanding. AskingCities generates a significant volume of qualitative data that, in order to become structured learning, requires an interpretation framework. The university can provide conceptual, methodological, and analytical tools that allow transforming dispersed histories into recognizable patterns, narratives into hypotheses for improvement, and evidence into proposals for institutional transformation. The key is that this analysis is always built on the basis of the reality expressed by citizens, not on theories imposed from outside.

Thirdly, the university offers public legitimacy. When an academic institution accompanies AskingCities, the resulting narrative takes on a different weight. Short reports, public presentations or simple technical notes that are born from university analysis can open doors in administrations or private entities, reinforcing the perception that AskingCities not only helps to solve specific cases, but also produces relevant knowledge to improve systems as a whole.

Fourthly, a University is a rich source of diverse givers.

Fifthly, AskingCities embodies a philosophy and approach to levelling up the Third Sector (“democratizing it”) in a way that hyperconnects its city/region and contributes strongly to increased social fairness and stability. All dimensions of this are powerful new research areas.

15.4AskingCities as a training and civic practice space#

The integration of AskingCities into a university environment generates an extraordinary type of learning. The students who participate not only know the social reality better, but also develop listening, empathy, communication and analysis skills that could hardly be acquired through theoretical exercises. Direct contact with the community transforms the educational experience, because it places the student in a situation where their work has real consequences for real people.

This learning is not only technical. AskingCities teaches us to navigate uncertainties, to work with sensitivity, to balance rigor and closeness. It trains more prepared professionals and more committed citizens. At a time when many universities are looking for new educational methodologies, AskingCities becomes a laboratory where learning by doing citizenship is achieved, where academic training is reconciled with public life and where knowledge is understood as a shared good.

15.5A synergy that transforms all actors#

The relationship between AskingCities, the civic university and citizen science is not accidental, but structural. AskingCities provides an operational framework that generates evidence on an ongoing basis; the community brings lived experience; the university provides analysis, systematization, and legitimacy; and citizen science provides the ethical and methodological context that makes it possible to recognize the value of citizen knowledge. This interaction produces a unique ecosystem in which each actor is strengthened and where the result is greater than the sum of its parts.

AskingCities, the civic university and citizen science form a triangle of collaboration that allows us to move towards a society where knowledge is shared, where institutions listen and where citizens become the protagonists of their own future. This synergy represents a contemporary and profoundly human way of understanding the university mission: a mission that is not limited to transmitting knowledge, but contributes to transforming realities, an urgent need in times that demand closer, more humble and more committed institutions.