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.

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.