Assumptions, Constraints and Future Considerations

Through the three strategic convening sessions, other discussions, and secondary research, many assumptions, constraints and future considerations surfaced that should be addressed by Participatory Canada over the next ten years to effectively grow and scale the Participatory City approach. Using a futures lens and systemic solutions to consider possible externalities and uncertainties will ensure that the growth of Participatory Canada remains flexible and adaptable to any possible pathway the Participatory Canada Roadmap might take during this decade.

A. Scale of Implementation: Deep (large) to small implementations

Most of the Participatory Canada Roadmap describes the scale, or depth of implementation, as the quantity of programs within a given city. This includes the number of shopfronts, learning architecture elements in the school, and participation from cities across the programs. Participatory Canada should work to identify and measure other factors across the essential components for scaling (see Figure 7) that currently play a role in successfully embedding the core principles, expertise, and momentum towards practical participation ecosystems. For example, other essential components of deep scaling could include how deep the knowledge and experience of practitioners may be in a community and in a city overall.

B. City scaling through existing participatory practices

Participants in the strategic sessions advised to create one deep city implementation to provide a successful use case that can build confidence for potential partners and funders in scaling the Participatory City approach to other eager cities. However, this pathway omits the potential to leverage a blossoming social sector that is emerging across Canada. A focus of Participatory Canada could be on supporting communities with existing participatory practices in place. Adding the Participatory City approach to existing practices could amplify the effects of existing programming, leading to faster and stronger creation of social and systemic infrastructure for long term systems change and community resilience. There are many organizations and large public agencies that can provide the connections, resources, and programs to scale quite rapidly across municipalities while enabling adaptation to each local context. Leveraging community networks could create opportunities for scaling the adoption of ‘products’ like the Tomorrow Today Street kits in 190+ municipalities across Canada. Participatory Canada should explore partnerships in cities with ongoing social R&D and practical participation infrastructure to see how, collectively, impact can be accelerated in those communities. Participatory Canada should ‘leap-frog’ support as much as possible for every new city implementation to build off existing learnings, architecture, and infrastructure rather than starting from scratch each time. This would enable quicker and more successful deployment and development of impacts for people, place, and planet compared to each previous city implementation. Building off other experiments and use cases predicates a high degree of learning and immersive experiences to fully understand the conditions for success and how they may apply to new contexts. This will have implications to how cities construct and educate their teams prior to, and during implementation, creating the necessary capacity to effectively implement these practical participatory ecosystems within their communities in highly adaptive ways.

D. Maintaining momentum for learning and collaboration across time

As a relatively new initiative in Canada, the momentum and ‘stickiness’ of the sharing of new learnings and collaboration across teams will need to be proven over time. As the model matures, Participatory Canada and the city teams should consider how to redistribute the effort needed to continue to increase the approach’s effectiveness, draw on new learnings, and create best practices that can be used for leapfrogging. For example, types of learning architecture that favour in person engagement or intimate learning can keep energy high, but require dedicated resources and potentially higher costs to sustain. Programs for practitioners, such as communities of practice, utilize the interest and energy from participants and can bridge distance through digital mediums, but also require effort and coordination to curate and sustain relevant topics. Over time, these types of initiatives may succumb to lack of inertia and relevancy for participants and should be recognized as a potential risk to decreasing effectiveness of the approach in later phases of Participatory Canada growth and scaling.

E. What does sunsetting look like for partners and organizations?

While there is an ambition to have funding for the Participatory City approach embedded into each city budget as part of ongoing support costs for social infrastructure, there is no clear pathway for how to shift it there. Participatory Canada will need to manage emerging tensions along this pathway from funding and early-stage partners on how their engagement in Participatory Canada sunsets and transitions to longer term partners and funders as the program builds capacity and grows in local communities over time.