Exploring Urban Biodiversity: A Multifaceted Approach in Liège, Belgium

Urban biodiversity can offer experiences in nature to a large number of people who live near it, however we need to make sure that nature within the city is and keeps being accessible and visible to everyone. Citizens represent a promising avenue for collaborative research providing them with opportunities to actively participate in knowledge production, assessment, and decision-making in urban environments. Supporting participatory activities can have a significant impact on their willingness to protect it. Here I will specifically focus on our practice of ‘exploratory walks’ in several urban areas within the city of Liege. This approach to co-producing knowledge "in situ" consists of observing and questioning ourselves by moving together, in order to deepen our perspective, to engage in debate and reflection around our places of life, from different environments. When exploring neighborhoods and discussing nature in the cities, participants become producers of knowledge (untold stories) and contribute with their own personal experience to document the change in their area. We can therefore promote a better understanding of the qualities of places through the sharing of naturalist, ecological or historical knowledge and, on the other, to nurture an ecological awareness through the observation of biodiversity at different scales.