Scaling Approaches

Since the Participatory City approach is highly adaptive in nature and focuses on developing a learning, knowledge and capacity building model through fostering deep working and learning partnerships, how to grow and scale the approach needed to be considered carefully.

Through the three strategy sessions, the Participatory Canada core team, city leads, and current and potential partners considered the strategic choices around common social innovation scaling approaches (see Figure 6), framed around opportunities to best enable successful growth and scaling in Canada that fit with the Participatory City approach. They explored aspects of how far to:8

• Scale out by adapting the Participatory City approach in additional communities and cities, and growing the deep learning relationships and networks between cities, not through replication, • Scale up by changing larger systems and policies and informing regime change, such as defining social infrastructure for our times, and communicating to shift the broader cultural landscape for practical participation ecosystems, and • Scale deep by deeply embedding the Participatory City approach in places and local culture, growing the deep learning relationships with people and communities, while ensuring flexibility and adaptation to different and relevant contexts and circumstances.

Overall, contributors were explicit about wanting to avoid a cookie cutter, franchised model that felt imposed on communities and was perceived as ‘top down’ decision making. Growing and scaling the Participatory City approach in Canada in a sensitive and responsive way will depend on many factors, including being conscious of when it is appropriate to scale deep, up or out. Building networks and partnerships systemically and with purpose, while seeking new resources and financial models, will support effective growth, balanced through the ongoing commitment to deep learning and research with communities.