The Strength of Codesign: Citizens as Community Builders

Paper in proceeding, 2012

Transdisciplinary research, integrating practice and academia, and including citizens as knowledge producers in urban development processes can lead to successful community empowerment in urban design. In such approaches, citizens are considered community builders and therefore are invited by the authorities to build knowledge by codesigning artifacts in urban space. This paper will present experiences from a Swedish project in the context of stigmatized outskirts of metropolitan areas, where inhabitants have been involved in codesigning a stage in a local park, to be built during the winter 2012/13. The project is carried out as part of a municipal project called ‘Development Gothenburg Northeast’ funded by the European Union and supported by a research project called ‘INTERPLACE—The interplay between citizen initiatives and invited participation in urban planning’ funded by Formas.