The Build4People project is very happy about a joint publication at the Cambodia Journal of Basic and Applied Research. The leading author is Dr. Bunleng Se from the Department of Geography and Land Management at Royal University of Phnom Penh (RUPP) with contributions from further Build4People team members.
This publication which got published as so-called editorial paper is generally dealing with the implementation of citizen science approaches among higher education institutions and their potential benefits in regard of research and lecturing as well as public participation.
The rationale behind is that traditional top-down planning approaches often fail to reflect lived experiences, especially in dynamically growing cities such as Phnom Penh. Against this backdrop, the implementation of digital citizen science tools allow the urban population to add subjective perceptions to objective metrics. Examples of such subjective perceptions would be thermal comfort, shading availability, or heat stress
More specifically, the paper introduces about the B4P Citizen Science App which got experimentally applied during a Build4People Transformation Workshop in early December 2025. Thereby, it was the aim to link subjective data gained through the App with objective data of measured environmental features. In our case, this combined approach enabled the app users to infuse their personal feelings of thermal comfort and perceived urban quality of life beyond pure measurement of (objective) weather data. The testing of the B4P Citizen Science App among Workshop participants took place at two sites of RUPP campus with distinct environmental features.
The results of the exploratory empirical survey showed that the use of such a citizen science app provides indeed valid data and that consequently the development of the B4P Citizen Science App should be further continued as joint implementation orientated project between the Build4People project team members and their colleagues from Royal University of Phnom Penh.