A co-creation toolkit 📍City of Espoo, Finland

Nina Rilla, Essi Laitinen, Mari Hukkalainen (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd)

Adopting a co-creation model can produce ecologically sustainable and smart and community-based and active urban areas, more user-oriented urban structures that are flexible during the regional lifecycle.

The co-creation model is a toolkit for developing sustainable and smart urban areas. It describes a general model for urban co-creation, considering the conditions and different starting points. The model originates from the SPARCS project in which ideas and co-creation practices, its potential and constraints were initially tested in the City of Espoo’s Kera region in Finland. The objective of SPARCS was to create a network of sustainable, energy-positive and carbon-free communities.

The toolkit describes the processes, methods and practices that support the development of sustainable and smart urban areas and the implementation of urban solutions at the regional level in cooperation with different stakeholders. Co-creation can produce ecologically sustainable, smart and community-based and active urban areas, more user-oriented urban structures that are flexible during the regional lifecycle.

The co-creating toolkit addresses key challenges for sustainable cities

Lack of stakeholder engagement in developing sustainable and smart urban areas is a common sustainability challenge for cities and regions. Implementing sustainability goals and solutions is also challenging in the multi-stakeholder context that includes various parties and vast scope of the task. To ensure continuous regional societal development. Co-creation can facilitate these challenges and ensure continuous regional societal development.

”Cities alone cannot meet the sustainability challenge, and for that we need extensive cooperation and the participation of residents. New models of cooperation in urban development are still taking shape, of which the co-creation model is an excellent example.” - Elina Wanne, the City of Espoo

Read full interview here.

In 2022, the co-creation process was conceptualised based on inputs of 130 individuals in more than 300 participatory instances. The co-creation model provides tools to support the development of different types of sustainable and smart urban areas in cooperation with city organizations, businesses, educational institutions, research institutes, other organizations and associations, and residents.

The pilot concentrated on energy and mobility, which account for more than 90 per cent of Espoo's climate emissions. The model development supports the city's goal of being carbon neutral by 2030.

The conceptualized co-creation model toolkit has six key themes:

1. Prerequisites introduces the process of developing a sustainable and smart city, its benefits and prerequisites.
2. Identification of starting points concretely describes important issues in the preparatory phase of co-creation.
3. Solutions’ development features the co-creation process examples, especially in creating sustainable mobility and energy communities.
4. Co-creation methods introduce the applicable tools
5. Roles of operators explain the roles of key stakeholders, and
6. Future aspects explore the possibilities for co-creation in future.

Key enablers, barriers, and lessons learned from the Kera region

Key inhibiting factors and barriers

• Co-creation within projects is mundane, but the interaction between projects (learning) is low.
• Tensions are likely to emerge, e.g. time horizons of different parties.
• Commitments, and especially agreements, must contain sufficiently concrete criteria, even down to project-level governance, but at the same time allow for sufficient flexibility.
• The obstacles to successful agreement and commitment should be opened for learning (so-called negative brainstorming).

Key enablers and lessons learned

• Establishing an open environment for information sharing, while maintaining the possibility of protecting legitimate business-related information.
• Develop processes and ways, a framework, to motivate different actors to work together towards common goals
• Communication is important in long chains of actors, where responsibilities are divided into smaller fragments.
• Dialogue between the different projects is important.
• Groundwork should be done carefully, i.e. the actors should maintain a common understanding of the objectives.
• As a body with a long-term interest, the city can e.g. reward actors for their contribution to the objectives, for example, through land use fees, land transfer and other instruments.
• The city can take a sparring role in getting property owners to be more eager to take on the role of developer.

The co-creation model can be replicated in any regional development project, and the concept can be applied to various sustainability areas. The demonstrations in the City of Espoo in 2022 broadly covered various low-carbon improvements of urban area development, including buildings, energy systems, transportation, urban planning and citizen engagement.