1.3 Collaborative city

A collaborative city is a prerequisite for successful co-creation at a practical level. For sustainable and smart regions, it is important to take into account the region’s current starting points and the innovations and solutions offered by the operational environment – and the testbeds and markets for these innovations offered by regional development. Thus, project- or region-specific co-creation:

  1. Needs strategic support from the city administration
  2. Requires new actors, such as solution providers, service providers and users, as well as regional operators, to enter the traditional process
  3. Requires the development of permanent sectoral ecosystems (such as mobility, energy, etc.) and a continuous dialogue with them at city level
  4. Needs communication on the co-creation objective and commitment of the city organisation in this approach
  5. Requires co-creation resources, skills and roles in the process

How sustainability and the digital solutions that support it could best be implemented at regional and project level

A sustainable and smart city is also achieved by using organisation skills


Case Amsterdam

Amsterdam has moved forward with a strong, holistic smart city strategy, closely linked to urban planning. Amsterdam Smart City (ASC) is an innovation platform for a sustainable city of the future. The platform is based on a rapidly growing community of around 400 organisations and over 5,000 people, including many start-ups. Community members have launched many internationally renowned projects, such as Circular Amsterdam and City-zen. The community works with the Amsterdam Economic Board, a foundation that promotes cooperation between research institutes, the university, businesses and governments. The strategy of both organisations strongly prioritizes the development of bottom-up urban policies and is strongly based on co-creation.

The Amsterdam Smart City project aims to test, through partnerships, smart technologies that save energy, reduce carbon emissions and facilitate sustainable choices in the Amsterdam region. Another objective is to achieve innovation-led economic growth. In Amsterdam, the Smart City has been led by a curator since 2016 and private sector involvement has been established to ensure the sustainability of the results.

This example from Amsterdam illustrates well that co-creation can flourish in cities when it is set as a strategic objective and organised in a way that takes into account the facilitation of co-creation and the different forms it can take. There is also a need for permanent ecosystems for actors from different sectors in order to exchange new knowledge and prepare the prerequisites and initiatives for project-specific consortia and success stories. In such a model, initiatives from outside the city and regional development organisation are not a disturbance, instead they function as expected catalysts for development, and the organisation has been made ready to receive them.