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Young Hamburgers shape their city: Focus on digital participation!
On October 17, 2025, Hamburg students held a workshop on digital city design with AI and new forms of participation.
Young Hamburgers shape their city: Focus on digital participation!
On October 13, 2025, the workshop “Future Workshop Hamburg: Rethinking Favorite Places” took place at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HCU) as part of Code Week. As part of the “City Talks Hamburg Digital” (StaGe) project, 10th grade students from Osterbek High School took part. The workshop was organized under the leadership of Paul Linnow and attracted key players from the Hamburg city administration, including Ksenija Bekeris, Senator for Schools, Family and Vocational Training, and Christian Pfromm, Chief Digital Officer of the City of Hamburg. The aim was to actively involve young people in the design of the digital city.
The focus of the event was digital participation. The aim was to create new dialogue channels between citizens and administration and to give young people the opportunity to sustainably shape the digital transformation of their city. The use of artificial intelligence and digital tools, including the participation platform DIPAS, opened up new perspectives for participants to visualize urban visions of the future. The result of the workshop clearly shows that digital participation is a concrete means of actively shaping the urban environment.
Digital participation as a new approach
Digital technologies are increasingly changing the relationship between citizens and administration in modern cities. Digital participation is viewed as a modern model of urban democracy that offers numerous benefits, including flexibility and accessibility. These new platforms enable people to participate in decision-making processes regardless of place and time, which particularly benefits underrepresented groups, as mobile participation and multilingual offerings show.
According to experts, digital participation improves transparency and promotes trust and a sense of responsibility in administration and politics. Digital participation platforms also offer efficient opportunities to submit your own ideas, take part in votes and visualize planning drafts, which can enable tens of thousands of people to be involved.
Challenges and future prospects
Despite the many opportunities, there are also challenges in digital participation. Issues such as digital divide, participation fatigue and the risk of manipulation through false information must be taken seriously. This makes it all the more important to strategically integrate digital formats into administrative processes, as the partnership between demokratie.today and CIMAberatung + Management GmbH shows. This collaboration aims to link digital and analogue participation formats.
The future development of citizen participation depends largely on the successful combination of both forms. Successful practical examples, such as the Smart City model project in Jena, show that this integrated approach is not only more effective, but also fairer. The step into a digital future in which citizens are actively involved in decision-making processes is definitely an important step for the future of urban society.
Overall, this approach makes it clear that digital participation not only serves as a tool for actively shaping the urban landscape, but also as an opportunity to create a new urban culture of dialogue between citizens and administration. It remains to be seen how these developments will unfold in practice.