Co-creation and sustainable urban planning: Who co-creates sustainable mobility solutions at the neighbourhood level? - Experiences from the Horizon 2020 Project "Sunrise"

Abstract

In urban planning the involvement of residents and other stakeholders is an important element in promoting sustainable spatial development. New concepts like co-creation are developing and spreading worldwide, with the aim of supporting sustainable urban transition and transformation. Co-creation is applied as a key concept to develop, implement, assess, and facilitate learning about new ways to address urban mobility challenges at the neighbourhood level in the HORIZON 2020 project SUNRISE ("Sustainable Urban Neighbourhoods - Research and Implementation Support in Europe"). SUNRISE´s objective is to contribute to sustainable urban development by stimulating co-creative processes and problem solutions in neighbourhoods in the field of new mobility concepts and new forms of mobility. Towards this aim, six cities (Bremen, Budapest Jerusalem, Malmö Southend on Sea, Thessaloniki) are fostering comprehensive collaborative processes with various actors in specific neighbourhoods with the explicit mandate to implement sustainable mobility solutions. The involvement of different actors is an important aspect and a challenge for co-creation processes. On the one hand, the involvement of residents and other stakeholders in sustainable urban planning is seen as promising. in terms of achieving better results to improve the adaptability of socio-ecological systems. On the other hand, there are often questions such as: "who is participating?", "how can different actors be reached?" and "what results can be achieved with co-creation?". This paper provides answers to these questions based on experiences from co-creation processes in the SUNRISE project. After defining and embedding the term cocreation in planning theory, this paper gives an overview of the involved actors in the co-creation processes in SUNRISE, the co-creation activities carried out, and the mobility solutions developed on the neighbourhood level. Finally, the challenges of involving various actors in co-creative processes and the opportunities for cocreation when planning sustainable mobility solutions on the neighbourhood level will be discussed.