How to co-create your city

If you have never been involved in setting up a co-creation activity, it might look like a daunting task. Where to begin, and how? With this guide, we want to give you some directions on how you could use the collection of tools from the co-create your city toolkit so that you can set up yourself (or with your team) a co-creative process for your project.

This collection of tools can assist you in facilitating a multi-stakeholder process or activity related to urban development. The toolkit is structured upon five core categories, depending on the target you may set for your co-creative activity. Those categories are:

Need Identification & Analysis

In this category, you can find tools that will help you explore and uncover different needs, views, values, and goals your participants may have upon a specific topic/issue, helping you to understand and analyze the present and thus plan better for the future.

Ideation & Visioning

In this category, you can find tools that will help you stimulate your participants' creativity in attractive and interactive ways to get inspiring and innovative ideas and solutions.

Strategy Development

In this category, you can find tools that will help your participants plan concrete actions for the future to achieve the goals of your project in the long run.

Prototyping & Testing

In this category, you can find tools that will help you experiment with the developed solutions or actions, testing them in a real-life setting.

Feedback & Evaluation

In this category, you may find tools to help you evaluate your participants' reactions, preferences or oppositions towards the developed solutions or actions.

After determining your co-creation target and selecting the corresponding category, you are ready to explore your alternatives. Under each category, you can find a wide range of tools. You can use a series of criteria that are available and can help you filter out your options based on your own needs. Those criteria are:

• Format: you can find tools in various formats, including workshops, methods, ICT (using online software) or templates, for which a downloadable file is available for you to print out or use online with your participants.
• Facilitation Level: based on your or your team's experience in facilitating such tools, you can choose among tools that range from beginner (no or little experience with facilitation) to advanced (committed and experience facilitator(s)). The facilitation level can be determined individually for one main facilitator of the activity or, even better, for a small team of facilitators with diverse backgrounds, competencies, and experiences.
• Target group: it is very important to select appropriate tools based on the participants you aim to engage in your activity. The target group criterion is based on the group size and the group's expertise. For the former, you can choose tools appropriate for small, medium, or large groups, but even tools that can be facilitated with any number of participants. The group expertise is related to the extent to which your participants should be familiar with the scope and content of your activity, ranging from beginner to advanced.
• Time frame: Time is a very important aspect that you must consider when planning and later facilitating a co-creative activity. In each category, you can find tools that can be facilitated in less than an hour and up to 2-3 days of workshops. Depending on your intended outputs, available resources, and ensuring that you can keep your participants actively engaged, you can choose the tools accordingly.

The co-create your city toolkit is deliberately not a fixed step-by-step guide since we believe that each project, each team of facilitators and participants or context is unique. This guide is, therefore, supportive of designing your own co-creation journey. Many of the tools can be used by and with stakeholders who have no background and/or experience in urban development but can provide valuable input.

The selection of the relevant stakeholders to engage with your activities, depending on your goals, stage of the project, or issue at hand, is very important. Together with your team, you need to identify and plan well in advance the involvement of your participants, ensuring their relevance and future commitment to your activity. The tools Power Interest Matrix and Stakeholder Journey (under the Need Identification & Analysis) can help you with that. We suggest that you use these tools before reaching out to potential participants.

Each tool aims to provide concrete outputs and can be done as a stand-alone exercise but also as part of a long process with multiple steps (e.g., when facilitating a multi-Criteria Analysis, depending on the step of this exercise, different tools might be more relevant to be used). Note that the descriptions and instructions of all the tools are given in simple terms, so your participants can also go through and understand the aim and function of the tools.