Social-Ecological Knowledge Integration in Co-Design Processes: Lessons From Two Resilient Urban Parks in Chile

Abstract

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 feasibility. 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 actors. 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.