Watch the recording: Karin Juhl of Hillerød Municipality and Aline Muylaert of Go Vocal discuss how the Danish city uses digital engagement and AI to address public issues

Residents of Hillerød, Denmark, a municipality of about 54,000 people located 40 kilometers north of Copenhagen, joke that it is easier to get across Manhattan than to drive through their town center. 

They are not entirely wrong. A historic castle takes up roughly a quarter of their central district, and local officials say about 5,000 additional cars have joined daily commuter traffic over the past five years as companies have moved into the area.

Congestion has become painful, and leaders expect it to worsen. Building more roads was not on the table. There simply was no space. So the municipality tried a different approach: instead of guessing what residents wanted, it asked them about the problem and how to fix it. 

Asking the Public

Using "Sammen om Hillerød" ("Together about Hillerød"), the city's digital participation platform built with Go Vocal, officials launched an engagement on green mobility and congestion. They combined online input through surveys and open-ended submissions with in-person meetings.

On its digital platform, the city presented residents with the challenge: traffic is expected to increase by 60–90 percent on key roads by 2030, and there is no room to build additional capacity in the town center. From there, the engagement unfolded across multiple discussion threads.

One, for example, asked residents to react to draft principles such as prioritizing cyclists in the city core or expanding car-free zones. Others posed targeted questions, like asking commuters about their daily travel habits. Another invited citizens to give input on different tools in the city’s “traffic toolbox” for managing congestion.

Combining multiple online and offline options made it easier for different residents to participate in different ways; they were not forced into a single channel. The result was more than 1,400 contributions

What Hillerød heard

 From that process, a clear priority emerged. Many residents favored increased biking and public transit, especially for trips under 2 km. 

Politicians did not expect that. 

Instead of pushing for a "build our way out" response, many people discussed routines and trade-offs, suggesting a willingness to be part of the solution.

"It has been a game changer," said Karin Juhl, who has worked on community engagement for Hillerød Municipality for nearly 30 years. The residents' input, she said, "made a huge impact" on how politicians thought about the problem.

Making sense of 1,400 voices

 The practical challenge in any open-ended engagement is often not just collecting input but making sense of it.

 With more than 1,400 written contributions on mobility and congestion, Hillerød staff would have struggled to read and summarize everything quickly using traditional methods. The platform includes AI tools that group similar submissions, identify common themes, and generate draft summaries for staff to review.

"What's fantastic about AI is that we can ask open questions. We don't have to guess what this is about for the citizens," Juhl said. 

For Juhl, a key aspect of the platform is that the AI-generated summaries are not a black box. When the system produces a synthesis, staff can click through to the underlying submissions and check what residents wrote.

"We can check that it's not hallucinating or getting things wrong," she said. "We can get into the original data and see if it's actually a sensible summary."

 That transparency matters because the real work comes after clustering. Once staff can see what people are saying at scale, they can focus on assessing what is feasible, what needs follow-up, what should be tested, and what requires political decisions.

 Participation as infrastructure

Hillerød's leaders began developing a fresh approach to public participation in 2018.

After a local election, the municipality convened a group of politicians and residents who met over several years to discuss ways to improve community engagement. After the first year, they decided to adopt a digital platform. 

Today, "Sammen om Hillerød" has more than 4,500 registered users and has hosted more than 50 substantive engagement projects across urban planning, climate initiatives, participatory budgeting, and more. 

The city also uses a citizen proposal system that predates the digital platform. Any resident can submit a proposal. If it receives 450 votes within six months, the local government must formally debate it.

 That does not guarantee implementation. It does guarantee that officials will engage seriously and explain their decisions. Proposals that don't reach the threshold still receive attention, as Juhl reviews submissions and flags them to relevant departments to see what is being done on the topic.

"It helps citizens feel that we take things seriously," she said.

Challenges

Hillerød's challenges may be as instructive as its successes. 

"The AI platform is intuitive to use," says Juhl, "but adoption across a municipal bureaucracy takes effort. Training must happen when staff need to use the platform; abstract instruction does not stick."

There are also organizational hurdles. Politicians and front-line staff often embrace engagement readily. Middle management, juggling competing pressures, sometimes views citizen input as a complication rather than a resource. Building buy-in at every level remains ongoing work.

But results in Hillerød suggest the effort pays off.

By starting with listening across diverse channels, leaders created room to talk honestly about congestion, alternatives to driving, and what would actually make people choose those alternatives. The traffic problem is not yet solved, but the people who live with it are now genuine partners in finding solutions.