Inholland University of Applied Sciences - Community-based developments and urban innovation ecosystems

Topic 2: Community-based developments and urban innovation ecosystems.

The basis of the proposal is that the users of cities are increasingly diverse and no longer fit with fixed patterns such as ‘the local community’. Instead, there are =a mulitide of ‘communities’ living near each other in one neighbourhood. On top of this, there is an increasing sense of cities as places for transitory people, who make use of the city, or a neighbourhood in a city, for shorter periods of time (e.g. tourists, day visitors, digital nomads, students) while day-to-day city users have with changing roles (e.g. as commuter, employee, business owner).

Such developments impede the idea of creating community-led urban innovation systems and co-creation. The notion of engaging with residents to democratize city making through processes of co-design and co-creation is attractive to both policymakers and the academic community. However, because of the developments mentioned above, in practice it has proven difficult to do justice to the, often different and sometimes conflicting, interests of different local stakeholders.

The current project seeks to support local stakeholders in overcoming these conflicts, by introducing the concept of systemic co-design as a means of conflict resolution by creating emphathy for ‘the other’. This is used as the starting point to work towards resilient places, and social innovation.