Climate change affects cities in every region of the world, and cities need to improve their urban resilience. Resilient measures are often implemented in public spaces because they are the urban voids in which infrastructures, water, biodiversity, mobility, and human life unfold. However, their institutional settings often make their design processes significantly challenging. Many complexities must be agreed upon and integrated into designing resilient public spaces. Taking a collaborative approach to designing public spaces has been said to improve their resilience by involving different actors and integrating their aims and knowledge. However, the mechanisms to do so remain unclear. This research explores how a collaborative approach can contribute to the design processes of resilient public spaces. It does so in the geographical context of Chile, a territory prone to diverse climate change impacts. It poses that revised urban design processes are crucial for implementing resilient public spaces. It focuses on co-design processes and their mechanisms and methods to integrate the diverse knowledge backgrounds of the involved actors. The studies examine the co-design processes of prominent resilient public spaces in Chile and design one in the same context. This research aims to contribute to urban design by formulating a comprehensive framework and guidelines for designing resilient public spaces collaboratively. It contributes generalisable and context-specific findings with particular emphasis on the Chilean context.

Cities worldwide face multiple social and ecological challenges, such as climate change and its impacts. Adapting and transforming our urban environments is urgent to improve their resilience to uncertain scenarios. These challenges require renewed urban solutions and force us to rethink their design processes. Multiple actors are involved in such processes, coming from different sectors, and sometimes having conflicting agendas and knowledge backgrounds. Many of these processes can be considered co‐design processes, with actors interacting to improve the design quality, legitimacy, and feasibil-ity. Many conceptualise cities as social‐ecological systems and public spaces are their subsystems. A collaborative approach to designing public spaces contributes to integrating the social‐ecological knowledge from the public, private, and citizen act-ors. The question remains: How is sometimes conflicting social‐ecological knowledge integrated into public space co‐design processes? We study two large‐scale urban parks in Chile. We framed them as social‐ecological systems and analysed their co‐design processes. This study aims to provide insights into the difficult‐to‐grasp phenomena of knowledge integration in co‐design processes. We analysed these cases in previous studies. Now we provide insights into social‐ecological knowledge integration in co‐design processes. Although framed in Latin America, the findings may be helpful elsewhere.

With the increasing social and ecological pressures on urban settlements, re-thinking how we produce them becomes a growing concern. Due to the diversity of actors across sectors and backgrounds involved in such design processes, collaboration is of utmost importance. Co-design can thus play a crucial role in integrating aims and knowledge as an evolving institutional process toward feasible, suitable and legitimate projects. While many studies on co-design focus on one-time activities, little attention is paid to conceptualising how such processes occur, involving several actors in dynamic participatory ways. We propose a Co-Design Framework and suggest that collaboration is achieved at many levels within different design steps in the process. Analysing three Chilean public space co-design processes through the lens of our framework, we highlight the intrinsic diversity of such an approach. This study posits that three co-design arenas interact (strategic, transdisciplinary, and socio-cultural) according to their main aims to enable, inform, and legitimise the projects accordingly. Our framework contributes to conceptualising and analyzing co-design and may also be useful to plan and develop such processes in academia and practice.

With the urgency to adapt cities to social and ecological pressures, co-design has become essential to legitimise transformations by involving citizens and other stakeholders in their design processes. Public spaces remain at the heart of this transformation due to their accessibility for citizens and capacity to accommodate urban functions. However, urban landscape design is a complex task for people who are not used to it. Visual collaborative methods (VCMs) are often used to facilitate expression and ideation early in design, offering an arts-based language in which actors can communicate. We developed a co-design process framework to analyse how VCMs contribute to collaboration in urban processes throughout the three commonly distinguished design phases: conceptual, embodiment, and detail. We participated in a co-design process in the Atacama Desert in Chile, adopting an Action Research through Design (ARtD) in planning, undertaking and reflecting in practice. We found that VCMs are useful to facilitate collaboration throughout the process in design cycles. The variety of VCMs used were able to foster co-design in a rather non-participatory context and influenced the design outcomes. The framework recognized co-design trajectories such as the early fuzziness and the ascendent co-design trajectory throughout the process. The co-design process framework aims for conceptual clarification and may be helpful in planning and undertaking such processes in practice. We conclude that urban co-design should be planned and analysed as a long-term process of interwoven collaborative trajectories.

The implementation of adaptation measures and the improvement of urban resilience is a growing concern recently. While urban projects are encouraged to become resilient, there is an interest in the design processes that produce them. In the Latin-American context, co-design is gradually taking a central role in space production, recognizing the need for involving multiple stakeholders to achieve more integrated and inclusive designs. However, in the case of Chile, institutions are rather rigid, over-regulated, and tend to operate in silos. We investigate how the co-design of public spaces can contribute to urban resilience through a case study of two Chilean design processes. The study applies the evolutionary resilience framework (ERF) to assess urban co-design processes (Davoudi et al., Plan Pract Res 28:307–322, 2013). Barriers and enablers reported by the interviewees shed light on how the co-design processes evolved and contributed to, or hindered resilience. Co-design is seen as a preparation-building process towards climate resilience that can be furthered through persisting, adapting, or transforming collaboration and design process factors. This study operationalizes the ERF framework and proposes a flowchart to identify factors influencing urban resilience. Although the Latin-American context may differ from other places, this study provides insights to co-design processes elsewhere.

With the social, ecological and sanitary pressures on urban settlements and the public sector being unable to successfully provide such answers alone, co-design can play a crucial role towards urban transformations and resilient public spaces. We understand co-design as a process in which institutional networks of public, private, citizens, non-public organizations and partnerships collaborate in different levels within design steps. We understand public spaces as socio-ecological systems that unfold spatially and functionally. This study posits that co-design can improve the evolutionary resilience of the public space projects when the involved institutional networks bring socio-ecological knowledge and values to such processes of design. The question remains how does co-design actually influences the socio-ecological resilience of public spaces? And how can we analyze such co-designed outcomes? This article proposes a framework to analyze the resilience of co-designed public spaces, and studies two urban parks in the Atacama Desert. Findings suggests that a socio-ecological resilience approach to such co-design processes improves the local context-specificity and suitability of the designs emphasizing the transformative capacity of such collective urban spaces. And while doing so, it may improve their legitimacy and set the basis for the co-operation of such projects. The framework may be useful for future conceptualizations of urban co-design, as well as to plan such collaborative urban processes in practice. Although the cases are framed in Latin America; the findings may be useful elsewhere.