A Participatory Framework for Urban Revitalization: Methodologies for Collaborative Resource Management
Authors: Giannis Zgeras, Vily Mylona – Contributions: Alexandra Papadaki, Franka van Marewijk, Cinco Yu, Victor Munoz Sanz
The Community Engagement and Participatory Design Package outlines a comprehensive framework for fostering social innovation and collective transformation through participation, co-design, and shared learning. It proposes an integrated approach that connects theory and practice in community-based research and design, emphasizing how inclusive methodologies can enable citizens, institutions, and local organizations to collaborate in shaping their environments and everyday lives.
At the heart of this framework lies Participatory Action Research (PAR), a reflective process that merges inquiry with real-world action. Rather than treating communities as research subjects, PAR positions them as active partners in a continuous cycle of observation, experimentation, and collective reflection. This approach values local knowledge, cultural context, and lived experience as essential sources of insight. It creates a dynamic setting where research and practice evolve together, generating knowledge that is immediately applicable to community challenges. The goal is not to apply predesigned solutions but to nurture spaces where people learn, negotiate, and act jointly toward shared objectives.
The Living Lab is conceived as the primary environment for these processes. It functions as an open and experimental platform where diverse actors—residents, researchers, public officials, and civic organizations—can test new ideas under real-life conditions. By situating innovation in the physical and social fabric of the neighborhood, Living Labs transform everyday spaces into arenas for collaboration and learning. They bridge digital and material dimensions of urban life, allowing new governance models, design practices, and social relations to emerge through hands-on participation. Within this framework, the laboratory becomes not merely a research tool but a living system of relationships capable of sustaining long-term change.
Complementing this is the notion of Communities of Practice, which provides the social and pedagogical basis for sustained engagement. These communities form around shared interests, skills, or concerns and evolve through repeated interaction and mutual learning. They facilitate the transmission of knowledge between experts and non-experts and encourage the co-production of solutions that are contextually grounded. By cultivating communities of practice, the framework promotes social cohesion, inclusion, and a sense of collective authorship over the transformation of local spaces.
Co-design serves as a key methodological pillar that translates these values into practice. Defined as a collaborative and iterative design process involving all relevant stakeholders, co-design invites participants to redefine problems, imagine alternatives, and develop solutions together. It challenges the traditional division between designers and users, emphasizing cooperation, reciprocity, and shared decision-making. The process builds trust, strengthens community ties, and generates outcomes that are both creative and responsive to local realities. Through workshops, role-playing exercises, and participatory mapping, co-design becomes a means of transforming relationships as much as physical environments.
Another central concept within the framework is Placemaking, understood as the collective shaping and stewardship of public space. It links design with social engagement, highlighting the importance of community agency in creating environments that reflect local identity and foster well-being. Placemaking supports everyday forms of participation—small acts of care, repair, and reuse—that accumulate into larger processes of spatial and social regeneration. It turns the act of designing space into a democratic exercise, accessible to all, and oriented toward collective benefit.
The three levels of Community Engagement and Participatory Design Package: the whole process is informed by the experience of the partners, by keeping the main pillars of previously developed methodological approaches (user centered, qualitative data driven, design oriented and modular/customizable method) and adapting them through the lens of living labs in CUE. It is important for the research team not to reiterate an already implemented process of engagement and co-design, but to reflect on the lessons learned and develop an approach more oriented in the interaction of the researcher with the field and the specific characteristics of each case study. Consequently, we decided not to have a strictly prefigured sequence of canvases and steps in order to implement the design process, but to give space and time to the research field, with a view to enable participants to form the development of the living lab from its early stages. This also relates to our general intention to investigate how the role of the researcher as an expert with power in a co-design process, could be challenged through the horizontality implied by the approach of participatory action research. In this way, each level is informed by the following.
Methodologically, the package proposes a structured yet flexible process unfolding in three interrelated phases: Introduce, Engage, and Design. The first phase builds understanding among stakeholders and prepares facilitators to communicate ideas clearly and inclusively. The second phase deepens community involvement through interactive workshops, mapping sessions, and storytelling activities that elicit local perspectives and aspirations. The final phase translates these insights into co-design sessions where participants collectively develop scenarios, prototypes, or interventions that respond to shared priorities. This progression ensures that engagement evolves gradually—from awareness to empowerment—allowing participants to acquire the skills and confidence needed to co-create meaningful change.
From left to right: CORPUS serious game played in terms of Turin Living Lab, analogue photo taken in the neighborhood playground from a primary school student in the Aigaleo ULL – the Public Toilet of Thoughts used by inhabitants to share stories in the square during a public exhibition devoted to present materials of workshops conducted with 20th Primary School and Local Elderly Center.
A diverse collection of participatory tools supports each stage of this process. These include mapping exercises, ethnographic storytelling, collaborative model-building, serious games, and interactive installations designed to capture local voices and foster creativity. Each tool is adaptable, inviting people of different ages, backgrounds, and abilities to contribute in ways that are comfortable and meaningful to them. The toolkit as a whole demonstrates how engagement can be both systematic and playful, analytical and experiential.
Ultimately, the Community Engagement and Participatory Design Package presents an adaptable framework for collective transformation through learning, making, and shared responsibility. By aligning participatory action, design thinking, and community practice, it shows how local collaboration can generate new forms of knowledge and governance rooted in inclusivity, empathy, and experimentation. Its strength lies in the understanding that meaningful innovation begins not with technology or infrastructure, but with people working together to reimagine the places they inhabit.