Co-creation in circular cities: A design perspective

After the release of the European Green Deal for a Circular Economy (CE), more and more municipal authorities embed the Circular Economy principles into their visions and strategies, fostering the transitions towards ‘circular cities.’ Collaborative practices are becoming familiar and concepts such as co-creation are entering the policymaking vocabulary, indicating that citizens and other actors are asked to work collaboratively towards a sustainable future. This also means to re-design systems and services in cities to tackle the emerging social and environmental issues and co-create innovation paths. However, co-creation as an approach for innovation at the city level has not yet been thoroughly investigated with the need to systematise the knowledge produced and share processes and tools that can be replicated in other contexts. The aim of this paper is to outline a framework that can be used by cities to identify new opportunities for co-creation initiatives, from a design perspective. In particular, it delineates nine co-creation categories for sustainable development and identifies stakeholders and tools to be adopted by seeing CE principles as the ultimate goal