Valentina Bresciani (Linköping University)

Overview

This thesis develops a co-creative workshop format to support knowledge exchange between cities within the ELABORATOR project. It focuses on “twinning” a Lighthouse city (Copenhagen) with a Follower city (Lund), enabling practitioners to share experience and collaboratively address urban mobility challenges.

The work is grounded in the need for cities to respond to climate change and urban complexity through more adaptive and collaborative approaches. It proposes a shift from hierarchical knowledge transfer to peer-to-peer learning, supported by structured facilitation and practical tools.

The main output is a replicable workshop package, including a defined process, toolkit, and facilitation guide for future city collaborations.

Highlights

The thesis frames climate change and urban complexity as key drivers for new collaboration models in cities. It critiques traditional top-down and bottom-up approaches and positions co-creation as a “middle ground” that aligns stakeholders, practitioners, and citizens. Within the ELABORATOR framework, this is operationalised through Communities of Practice and city-to-city knowledge exchange.

The conceptual foundation combines co-creation, Living Labs, and knowledge exchange theory, particularly the interaction between tacit (experience-based) and explicit (documented) knowledge. The workshop is designed to externalise tacit knowledge through structured interaction, enabling practitioners to learn from real-world implementation rather than abstract models.

The core contribution is a five-phase workshop structure: introduction (“Meet the Cities”), collaborative work (“Co-creating with tools”), group reflection (“Café seminar”), documentation (“Reflections”), and feedback (“Evaluation”). As illustrated in the diagrams on pages 19–27, this structure balances knowledge sharing, hands-on problem solving, and reflection, ensuring both learning and actionable outcomes.

The workshop is grounded in real interventions from Copenhagen, including car parking reduction, bicycle infrastructure expansion, and traffic flow changes. These are explored using a dedicated toolkit with maps and physical elements (pages 28–30), enabling participants to visualise, discuss, and adapt solutions to their own context. The result is a practical, scalable format for peer-to-peer urban innovation and knowledge transfer.

Conclusion

This material presents a structured and practical approach to designing co-creative workshops for urban innovation. It demonstrates how cities can move from knowledge transfer to collaborative problem-solving by enabling direct interaction between practitioners.

The proposed format is adaptable and can be applied beyond the ELABORATOR project to other urban challenges and collaborative contexts. By combining structured facilitation with participatory tools, it supports more effective, inclusive, and context-sensitive urban development processes.