Facing Climate Change Challenges through Sustainable City Co-creation

To alleviate problems generated by climate change, cities cannot act alone but need to collaborate with multiple stakeholders including industry, non-profit sector, academia and, not the least, citizens whose behavior can make an impact on the territory. The aim of this paper is to enlighten how the city can engage stakeholders – especially citizens – in decision making processes of sustainable urban development.

While organizations can have financial or other interests to engage with sustainable urban development which entails (re)building processes able to affect the mobility and livability of cities, citizens might not see an immediate need to participate in the making and re-making of the city, neglecting their potential contribution to intergenerational equity.
While rebuilding cities, it becomes paramount to think of how it can become an attractive place where people want to live, work and visit. City managers and decision makers seek ways to enable citizens’ attachment to the sustainable development plans at stake. Pursuing sustainable development requires the management of financial constraints as well as considerations of environmental and social issues.

By adopting a case study approach with empirical focus on the Näsby district of Kristianstad City (Scania Region, South of Sweden), we investigate how a mid-sized city experiments with citizen engagement initiatives in the spirit of co-creation. The results show that simultaneously pursuing attractiveness and attachment, what we call attra-chment, requires both regulated and spontaneous initiatives to foster continued co-creation