Ambition and Vision for the Participatory City Approach

Participatory City is continually growing and evolving its ethos. It is a system that is organic and deeply collaborative, creating something greater than the sum of the individual parts. Relationships of participants and organizations are higher order and go beyond partnership agreements. Each city iteration helps the Participatory City approach cascade its development and learning, scaffolding knowledge and infrastructure. Essentially, it gets better and can grow faster each time; new implementations can leapfrog ahead as more infrastructure elements are developed.

The path forward for the Participatory City approach is very different from traditional models of scaling that only focus on replication and adaptation. This approach is intrinsically adaptive in the way it has been designed. It is building a transdisciplinary field of practice that requires deep collaboration and a unique way of thinking and working together. The complex nature of these new projects and systems that co-create and grow participation culture requires continual iteration, reflection and development, making this work highly additive in nature. The elements of the Participatory City approach have been and will continue to be co-created by all, making them accessible and available through open source sharing through Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Everyone becomes custodians of the Participatory City approach. Its work and learning, helping it to be bigger, better, richer, and more knowledge infused each time it gets developed in a new place (see Figure 3).

When a new city embarks on their Participatory City journey, they join a network of other cities who are building and layering on the existing progress of the Participatory City approach. This includes the structures, methods, models and strategies needed to co-create the support infrastructures and participatory ecosystems. The richness of each city’s local culture, ideas and experiences combine with them in a completely new and adaptive way. Ultimately, Participatory City aims to work with partner cities to develop a growing portfolio of participatory approaches and knowledge (see Figure 7 below for the Top Six Essential Components for Scaling Systems in New Places). Cities will be able to spend time on projects in deep collaboration, developing systems of support, curriculum and architectures of learning.

Figure 3 - Cascading and scaffolding the development, learning, knowledge and infrastructure of the Participatory City approach

Figure 4 - Convening Session 1, discussing the 10 year vision of the Participatory City approach in Canada

Working with Participatory City Foundation in the UK, the emerging global School Here&Now, and the Social R&D phase in Canada, Participatory Canada will co-create a strategy and implementation pathway that focuses on developing a learning, knowledge and capacity building model, and fosters deep working and learning partnerships needed to make this ambition aim possible. Two models that were considered and rejected because they were not a good fit to achieve the ambition included a “topdown organisation to deliver formulaic and imported participation systems across multiple cities’’, and a “franchise model with tight controls and limited adaptation capabilities’’. Due to the adaptive design nature of the Participatory City approach, it will continue to build forward with local Canadian communities in ways that are context appropriate. It is currently envisaged that each city could build local partnerships, such as for funding and investment, and Participatory Canada would support achieving the desired impacts through a connected network of cities in Canada to ensure a high level of quality and integrity to the approach. Participatory Canada will be central to knowledge building and codifying emerging testing and insights across the Learning Campuses in each city. They will support residents, neighborhoods, communities and cities to connect and fuse these with their local networks, and deep community knowledge and understanding, through the ongoing co-design, embedding, and developmental evaluation processes.

CO-DESIGN

A method of collectively surfacing initial ideas and applying shared knowledge in design thinking, whether it is a project, a session, a task, or a solution to a problem.

The 10 year vision in Canada, developed at Wasan Island in 2019, is still compelling and viable, even more so following the experiences and learning over the last year through COVID-19 (see Figure 4). Participatory Canada infrastructure could respond to the needs of communities by providing a platform to amplify efforts and remove barriers to practical collaboration and by deeply embedding learning and evaluation. At a neighbourhood level, developing in-person, participatory culture and experiences will create the opportunity for Canadian communities to recover from COVID-19 while focusing on the essential aspects of life that will help to build resilience to future crises. The potential pathways to achieve this ambition are explored in this roadmap.