The concept of the “co-created city” – experiences and visions of its implementation from the viewpoint of the Łódź authorities and Municipal Office stakeholders

Abstract

In November 2021, the Łódź City Council adopted the “City Development Strategy – Łódź 2030+” document. The strategy used the “cocreated city” catchword as its guiding idea. Also in 2021, the Łódź Foundation launched the Project “Łódź as a Co-Created And Co-Governed City”, which included a series of individual in-depth interviews with local journalists and municipal office stakeholders. For the purposes of this article, the collected research material was analysed in terms of current application of the governance concept elements. The visions of city governance offered by the authorities and by representatives of various stakeholder groups were also compared to each other. Moreover, an attempt was made to analyse the possible directions for the implementation of these visions. The conducted analyses show that the directions of activities to be undertaken in order to make the idea of governance a reality have been identified and described in a similar way by both the Łódź Municipal Office and the stakeholders. The differences between the two visions are the result of participatory, not always positive, experiences of stakeholders. Based on the hypothetical directions of implementing the idea of governance, either a variant assuming a new opening in relations with stakeholders or a variant of continued apparent activities appears likely.