Taking up TRUSTMAKING as an active and applicable response to the challenges of living together in cities, this research project aims to empower urban youth and build capacities of city governments for the new green transition. Establishing a trustful basis is key for well-informed, intergenerational, and cross-sector collaboration with city governments, entrepreneurs, and civil society organizations during urban development processes. Through Place-making practices we aim at fostering confidence of youth to co-create urban spaces, working in and with green infrastructures in four European cities: Oslo (Norway), Panevėžys (Lithuania), Vienna (Austria), and Valkenswaard (The Netherlands). Through Urban Living Labs, tools for youth co-creation of green infrastructure are identified and developed, and cross-section collaboration mechanisms are designed in summer/winter schools. Lastly, the development of TRUSTMAKING guidelines addresses capacity building in public service for integrating youth perspectives and competences that bridge short-term concerns and long-term objectives in urban transformation.

Project results summary (tentative)

TRUSTMAKING creates a place where everyone involved—specialists from science and everyday life, young people and city administration—meets to jointly create imaginaries about public spaces and green infrastructure. Through research-based placemaking and artistic strategies in four European cities—Oslo, Panevėžys, Rotterdam, and Vienna—the project aims to empower young creators and strengthen the capacities of city governments for co-creating a climate-just future.

Four European Urban Living Labs aiming for Youth Co-Creation

“Young people can act as a ‘connective tissue’ in public institutions, decision-making processes and public consultations to bridge short-term concerns and long-term objectives and build more fair and inclusive policy outcomes and societal resilience” (OECD 2018, 69). In the context of urban transformation, strategies that acknowledge youth to have an agency in the design and implementation of measures (OECD 2020, Bruselius-Jensen 2021) are essential for meeting long-term objectives in urban development. While young people have the right to participate in the decision-making processes, routines of urban planning and policy making often fall short in understanding youth’s needs and aspirations. Additionally, amid intersecting global crises, the general erosion of trust in society disproportionately impacts youth, challenging their ability to work as agents of change.

The project “Trustmaking. Young creators and responsibilities for the new green transition“, aimed to foster confidence of youth to co-create urban spaces in transformation through creatively working in public and green spaces in four European cities: Oslo (Norway), Panevėžys (Lithuania), Rotterdam (The Netherlands) and Vienna (Austria). In the Urban Living Labs of these cities the project teams co-created a trustful setting as a basis for well-informed, intergenerational and cross-sector collaboration with policy makers, entrepreneurs, civil society organisations and urban governments in urban transformation processes. Developing an innovative approach to co-creation with youth and cross-sector collaboration, the Trustmaking collective designed new tools and methods ranging from placemaking to artistic strategies. Additionally, cross-learning mechanisms were designed for international exchange in summer/winter schools and for rapid uptake of lessons learnt. At the end of the project, the experiences facilitated the identification of principles of youth co-creation and the increase of capacities in public service for integrating youth’s perspectives.

Methods and Experiences of an Interdisciplinary Project: The Manifold Trustmaking Activities

The first project phase was dedicated to co-research on and with youth to elaborate on the causes of low trust and engagement of youth from their perspective. Considering that co-research with youth should be emergent, open to change and adapt to the needs of participants, diverse research methods (e.g. ethnographic, socio-spatial, arts-based) were applied, developed and tested, some of them together with students from Social Design Studio at University of Applied Arts, the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Urban Design and Kaunas University of Technology to facilitate peer-to-peer learning. The newly developed research formats integrated focus groups, research walks, community mapping, and hands-on activities, e.g. “Coming-of-age – Walking focus group on youth’s perspectives in the eco-social transformation of the city”, “Exploring co-research and co-design approaches” – a course within the Social Design Master, “Climate-gardening with terra preta – Hands-on workshop with students and youth”, to “Community Mapping of Panevėžys” together with the Union of Youth Organizations of the city. Based on the findings of the co-research phase the four ULLs developed (artistic) interventions and co-creation workshops as empowerment strategies for youth to articulate future visions and wishes of green infrastructure and public spaces. The activities and workshops were created in close collaboration with various youth partners (such as schools, youth organizations and youth centres) and offered different opportunities for young people to co-create their city through 1) experiencing public spaces from the perspective of their needs and wishes to the city, 2) showing ways of how to re-appropriate spaces for leisure and through play, and 3) (temporarily) changing and re-designing free spaces based on their own ideas and claims. These activities not only highlighted the importance of understanding urban spaces through the perspective of youth but also made design opportunities tangible through e.g. visiting a DIY skateboard park or appropriating a grey mega-structure for a boxing workout, turning fallow fields into a playground for “Quer-Feld-ein-Hockey”, transforming a site into a film set for “Green Scripted Realities”, or designing and building urban furniture for an empty courtyard, just to name a few of the developed co-creation formats.

From Tentative Results to a Guidebook on Trustmaking

As a result of the project, the Trustmaking Guidebook (NAI publishing, forthcoming in 2025) will present the innovative approach to enhance co-creation with trustmaking principles revealed from transdisciplinary research beyond city planning domains. The guidebook of trustmaking principles not only will ensure continuous development of Urban Living Labs and the maintenance of co-created projects beyond the project phase, but aims to inspire young creators, policy makers and planners facilitating policy development towards acknowledging the agency of youth in urban transformation processes. In this guidebook, we as project consortium stress the importance to take the perspective of (and not on) youth in urban transformation processes. The publication adds an important but mostly overlooked and invisible aspect to the planning discourse and co-creation literature, which is the element of trust in processes of planning. By offering a broad range of co-creation methods, such as placemaking and arts-based strategies, the guidebook also serves as inspiration for planning professionals, policy makers, entrepreneurs in the field of urban participation and youth workers to explore hands-on and beyond-routine tools. With this guidebook, we bridge positions of city planning and urban development professionals, experts in participation, youth workers and all other practitioners interested in supporting the agency of and giving voice to young creators. Empowering youth to take action and become changemakers opens up future visions of a just city that go beyond what we imagine today.

More information on the ENUTC-project:

https://trustmaking.eu https://www.instagram.com/trustmaking.eu/, Mail trustmaking@uni-ak.ac.at

References:

M. Bruselius-Jensen, I. Pitti (eds.). Young people’s participation: Revisiting youth and inequalities in Europe. (Bristol: Policy Press, 2021)
OECD. States of Fragility 2018. (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264302075-en, p. 260.
OECD. Youth and COVID-19. Response, recovery and resilience. (Paris OECD Publishing. 2018).