Guidelines for the co-Design: How to Solve Urban Issues

My research aims to test how co-design can help to solve different urban issues and wants to produce a vademecum with guidelines on how to set a urban living lab to involve stakeholders for a co-design process. To do so I needed to study the state of the art, but I also needed to search for case studies with which to check which were the good and the bad practices. The cases I’m having the opportunity to work with are two: one is the planning for a City of Sport in the city of San Donà di Piave (Italy) and the other is a European Research Project, funded under the JPI Urban Europe, called LOOPER (Learning Loops in the Public Realm) which will apply the learning loop to the co-design process. To better explain, in the City of Sport of San Donà di Piave the Public Administration decided to activate a simple co-design process which will end with the production of a Masterplan for the area. On the other hand the case study of the LOOPER project has the ambition of creating a new way of decision-making which bring together citizens, stakeholders and policymakers that iteratively learn how to address urban challenges. Here there are three cities involved (Brussels in Belgium, Manchester in the United Kingdom and Verona in Italy) and I’m currently helping with the pilot case of Verona. This is an implemented co-design process as stakeholders in the end are called to evaluate what they have done. The methodology at the base of my research follows a predefined set of steps, some of which have already been done: study of the state of the art; search for some case studies; application of what have been learned from the state of the art to the case studies; check which practices can be considered as good, and which can be considered as bad, basing on their application to the case studies; cross the data collected from the state of the art and from the case studies; compare the case studies, as they use two different co-design processes. The expected result of my research is that of creating a vademecum with a set of guidelines which can be used to solve different urban issues, such as planning problems or to air quality problems, using the co-design process applied to urban living labs. Also, using the methodology above mentioned the co-design process will be implemented and explained in a more clear way.