In the face of urgent climate challenges, it’s critical for cities to engage their communities in efforts toward climate neutrality, raising awareness while sharing key insights and initiatives in a way that resonates with the public. Neutrality Story Maps (NSM) is a communication and engagement platform that is developed as part of the UP2030 project to meet this need. NSM allows cities to communicate climate-related data, challenges, and actions while also giving citizens a space to share their climate experiences, issues, and hopes. Through digital storytelling using a multimedia narrative format, NSM fosters collaboration and shared understanding between communities and policymakers, with the ultimate goal of advancing climate neutrality and resilience in urban areas.

The development of NSM is being conducted through a co-creative process led by the VUB (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) in collaboration with city representatives and citizens. The technical implementation of the platform is carried out by CERTH (Centre for Research and Technology Hellas) with a focus on building an easy to use platform that meets the diverse needs of the cities.

From Concept to Prototype
The development journey of NSM began with the VUB’s initial vision, where they outlined the foundational ideas for the platform. The VUB and CERTH worked together to explore the technical requirements that would make this vision practical, with CERTH proposing an initial tool structure based on these ideas. Building on this foundation, the VUB then collected initial requirements from three pilot cities through workshops, interviews, and surveys. CERTH participated to support the VUB with the process and ensure that the proposed features and suggestions were technically feasible.

With the initial user requirements defined, CERTH created mockups to demonstrate the tool’s design and functionality. These mockups presented the platform’s core features and provided a clear representation of the tool’s interface, helping cities better understand its potential and usability. The mockups were presented at the Cities Knowledge Exchange Event in Rotterdam in June 2024. Feedback from this event, along with subsequent meetings with all the cities and a follow-up survey, led to new requirements. The most significant of these was the inclusion of a city-customizable homepage within the platform.

As a result of this iterative process, the concept of the NSM platform was refined and finalized, centered around two core components: the Homepage and the Stories.

The Homepage is a customizable scrollytelling-article that cities can create to showcase climate challenges, actions, and local initiatives. It is structured into multiple pages, each supporting different layouts, such as media-only, text pages, or combinations of media and text.

Stories are multimedia posts composed of pages combining media and text, which can be created by both cities and citizens. Stories are geotagged and can be displayed on a map, with tags assigned to categorize their content. Users can engage with stories by liking, commenting, or sharing them on social media, while cities are responsible for moderating the content.

In addition, cities have advanced capabilities, such as creating threads to organize stories by topics, uploading resources like educational materials, and using administrative tools to manage and customize the platform. Both citizens and cities can explore stories through a timeline or map view, with filtering options to narrow down results. The Homepage and the Stories can be created through an easy-to-use interface provided by the platform.

The platform is designed to be mobile-friendly, easy to navigate and use even from users without technical expertise, multilingual, supporting the languages of participating cities, and accessible to users with special needs.

Developing the First Version

With the final requirements established, CERTH began coding the first version of the NSM platform. This initial development phase focused on implementing the tool's core functionalities, including the Homepage and Story page, along with dedicated pages for creating this content. Additionally, the first version introduced a timeline and map view for browsing stories, an initial authentication system, the like functionality, and the ability to switch between cities to explore their respective content.