Integrating communities of practice from URBiNAT cities

TIME

14.00 – 15.30, 3 September

GOAL

The aim is to expand our CoP which has organized several webinars since the last OLLD. The objective is to facilitate distributed discussions across seven URBiNAT cities plus invited city living labs.

CHALLENGE

We represent the European Nature-based solutions (NBS) project URBiNAT.
URBiNAT focuses on the regeneration and integration of deprived social housing urban developments through an innovative and inclusive catalogue of NBS, ensuring sustainability and mobilising forces for social cohesion. Interventions focus on the public space to co-create with citizens new urban, social and nature-based relations within and between different districts. Taking the full physical, mental and social well-being of citizens as its main goal, URBiNAT aims to co-diagnose, co-plan, co-design, co-implement and co-evaluate healthy corridor as an innovative and flexible NBS, which itself integrates a large number of micro NBS emerging from community-driven design processes. The project co-creates healthy corridor living labs in Nantes, Porto, Sofia, Siena, Nova Gorica, Brussels and Høje-Taastrup as well as working with cities in other countries. URBiNAT is already coping with limitations due to the pandemic crisis, and will demonstrate the combination of both in-person and virtual interaction which we believe is line with the theme “Connecting people & technology towards a citizen centred digital future”.

OBJECTIVE

We hope to evolve the CoP perspective both locally in each of the participating cities up until the start of the OLLD workshop and bring this into a wider discussion as cases with different living lab contexts and technological conditions. This we hope will enrich the discussion and focus the contributions in terms of solutions on the actual problems experienced in each of the cities.

OUTCOMES

TANGIBLE

The outcomes of the workshop will be very specific joint initiatives to be co-designed, co-developed and co-implemented following the workshop. The object of the workshop could be as simple as co-creating a “snake” of decorated stones along paths through participating city parks. As such it most likely will require additional online and physical meetings to bring the project to full implementation. The further co-creative processes will be further integrated into the living labs and healthy corridor establishment during the URBiNAT project.

INTANGIBLE

This should also lead to the establishment of a wider community of practice that will allow workshop participants and other interested persons to exchange experiences and conduct further joint project under the umbrella of URBiNAT and/or in via external collaborative activities at least for the rest of its duration (until 2023). We are clustering with other sister projects around co-creation of nature based solutions, who could also join this initiative. Furthermore, participants will walk away with knowledge of healthy corridor living lab activities in seven cities in Europe.

BRIEF OUTLINE / METHODOLOGY

The preceding workshop will conduct a co-creative process with challenge being defined ahead of the workshop with the participating cities. We will use a design thinking approach to understand the problem in the contexts of cities. Then define the specific problem and ideation and testing with the city groups followed by a final voting on the top three solutions to be further validated in experiments. The total event will take a full day, but the online workshop during OLLD will be limited to 1.5 hours at the end of the full day. Examples of tools we may use: Zoom, Mentimeter or Miro. There will be a City exchange prior to OLLD workshop with a physical and online workshop. This will lead to definition of experiments but also challenges for the OLLD workshop to address.
OLLD Online Workshop
10 min – Introduction to the work carried out at city level and the problem examined. 20 min – Presentation of experiments designed at city level and question to be addressed by the wider crowd presented by each of the participating cities.
45 min – Idea development using MIRO tool in break-out groups for each Question selected. 15 min – Summary of findings from MIRO idea maps and conclusions.

AUDIENCE

All persons interested in co-creation in living labs whether citizens, researchers, businesses or municipality representatives or consultants, will find this workshop relevant and valuable.