Today, citizens, professionals, civil servants, social enterprises, and others form different types of coalitions to overcome the challenges facing our modern cities. In this paper, the particularities of these types of groups are characterised and categorised into ten different types of city makers. Generally, these types of city makers bring value to cities, but we conclude that this value could be enriched through more participatory approaches that stimulate crossovers and accelerate the transition towards sustainable futures. Therefore, we characterise the different identified types as potential ‘participatory’ city makers. However, these participatory approaches and the networks between them still need to be developed, while improving conditions and dynamics that can enable and enhance innovation in urban environments. Design and systems thinking could contribute valuable methods and perspectives to the development of these participatory and systemic approaches. Finally, the categorisation presented in this paper must enable a better understanding of the transformative capacity of these different types of city makers, necessary for flourishing and sustainable communities.@en

This article aims to unravel the tensions that obstruct participatory city making: the processes in which government, entrepreneurs and citizens co-create new solutions for urban challenges. Participatory city making is explored and conceptualized through an empirical grounded study of local civil servants and citizen initiatives in Rotterdam. Through interviews and a set of three workshops the practices of these city makers are studied. A need for more transparency, influence and exchange was identified. The value of design is explored in general, and specifically the design of possible tools and interventions, to address the identified issues and tensions. This exploration shows that design-enabled interventions could, on the one hand, by 'infrastructuring', anticipate on the diffused design activities of individual actors in the urban context, and on the other hand, the use of these tools and interventions could promote participatory approaches among the different city makers towards urban sustainability transitions.

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Citizens and urban policy makers are experimenting with collaborative ways to tackle wicked urban issues, such as today’s sustainability challenges. In this article, we consider one particular way of collaboration in an experimental setting: Urban Living Labs (ULLs). ULLs are understood as spatially embedded sites for the co-creation of knowledge and solutions by conducting local experiments. As such, ULLs are supposed to offer an arena for reflexive, adaptive, and multi-actor learning environments, where new practices of self-organization and novel (infra-) structures can be tested within their real-world context. Yet, it remains understudied how the co-creation of knowledge and practices actually takes place within ULLs, and how co-creation unfolds their impacts. Hence, this paper focuses on co-creation dynamics in urban living labs, its associated learning and knowledge generation, and how these possibly contribute to urban sustainability transitions. We analyzed empirical data from a series of in-depth interviews and were
actively involved with ULLs in the Rotterdam-The Hague region in the Netherlands. Our findings show five distinct types of co-creation elements that relate to specific dynamics of participation, facilitation, and organization. We conclude with a discussion on the ambivalent role of contextualized knowledge and the implications for sustainability transitions.@en