Introduction

Many cities around the globe are faced with systemic challenges, such as growing inequality, unemployment, poverty, homelessness, inadequate healthcare, domestic violence, and racism, where individuals are often quite isolated from each other. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing systemic challenges in ways that have not been experienced before1. A number of progressive governments and like-minded organizations are viewing this as an opportunity for a reset – to build forward better.

Canada is no exception. In its fall 2020 economic statement2, it committed to spend up to $100 billion over the next three years, including on investments that will serve as a down payment for “transformative initiatives”3. There is a unique opportunity at this moment in time to explore how a national Participatory Canada scaling strategy could be one of those transformative initiatives. Participatory social infrastructure empowers people to be co-producers of transitions in their communities. Federal programs such as the Canada Healthy Communities Initiative4 signal a recognition of the need to invest in participatory social infrastructure as part of the COVID-19 recovery. Creating this new form of infrastructure will be crucial to building forward better from COVID-19, bridging social capital and cohesion, and strengthening civic legitimacy, collective agency, and resilience. Similarly, this work could be linked to transformative platforms and narratives like the EmergencE Room5, a collaborative environment for emergent initiatives that nurture deep, structural transition. This could enable participatory social infrastructure to foster a culture of participation and provide the necessary foundation to grow radically inclusive, cohesive, resilient, and vibrant communities.

There is a rich history to the Participatory City movement - originating in the UK, led by the Participatory City Foundation. During 2019 and 2020, Participatory City became international by establishing social research and development (Social R&D) sandboxes in Montreal, Halifax, and Toronto with Participatory Canada. This work was supported by the J.W. McConnell and Participatory City Foundations, with support from the Government of Canada (Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) Investment Readiness Program6) and with coalitions of local partners.

1 European Commission (September 9, 2020) “Strategic Foresight Report - Charting the Course towards a more resilient Europe” https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/strategic-planning/strategicforesight/2020-strategic-foresight-report_en 2 Department of Finance Canada (2020) “Fall Economic Statement 2020, Supporting Canadian and Fighting COVID-19,” https://www.budget.gc.ca/fes-eea/2020/home-accueil-en.html 3 Department of Finance Canada (2020) “Fall Economic Statement 2020, Building Back Better” https://www.budget.gc.ca/fes-eea/2020/themes/building-back-better-rebatir-mieux-en.html 4 Government of Canada through Infrastructure Canada with Community Foundations of Canada (2021) “Canadian Healthy Communities Initiative” https://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/chci-iccs/indexeng.html 5 To learn more, please visit https://emergenceroom.net/ 6 Employment and Social Development Canada (2019), “Investment Readiness Program” https:// www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/programs/social-innovation-social-finance/ investment-readiness.html

Participatory City has completed its fourth year of the ‘Every One Every Day’ initiative which is grounded in eleven years of research and deep engagement with ‘participation culture’ from new types of peer-to-peer initiatives that are inspired from around the world. The Participatory City approach brings residents of Barking and Dagenham, a borough in London, together to build practical everyday projects that create friendships, and healthy, sustainable, thriving communities. By making better use of spaces, resources, skills and knowledge, the Participatory City approach enables connected and supported collections of activities to effect change. It aims to be the first large scale, inclusive, practical participatory ecosystem.

The Participatory City approach relies on a support platform as a collection of coordinated and shared infrastructure and a participatory ecosystem that is a collection of many and varied practical projects and businesses (see Figure 1).

After evaluating the outcomes from year two of Every One Every Day, it was found that practical participation cultivates individual agency. The collective effects of many smaller actions and participation are needed to generate collective impact. The year 2 learnings7 from Participatory City, UK also demonstrate that if some or all of the following conditions can be met in a place, the Participatory City approach can drive towards positive and sustained community impact:

• High evidence of need, • Sufficient population density for peer-to-peer networks and network effects, • A determination to find new ways of co-producing outcomes, • A willingness to take risks on the part of funders, officials and politicians, • Possible experience of having tried other approaches without success, • A local champion or team willing to make the local case and co-ordinate decision-making, and • An understanding and appreciation of the possible benefits of participatory culture.

Began as a five-year initiative, formed out of a partnership between Participatory City and Barking and Dagenham Council, and it is the largest participatory project of its kind in the country. Enabling the community to work together in tackling disadvantage, inequality, loneliness and isolation in the London borough of Barking and Dagenham. These underlying community conditions could extend to implementing the Participatory City approach in other cities. The positive possibilities of the program have driven interest to test the approach, to build a global, connected learning architecture and school, and start by scaling impact in Canada. Figure 2 demonstrates the current global interest in establishing different cities as part of the Here&Now School of Participatory Systems and Design.

A Practical participatory ecosystem develops organically, is unpredictable in form, and is rooted in the shifting of interrelationships of many diverse and distinct parts (multiple residents joining and leaving, and projects emerging, thriving, replicating and stopping at a constant basis). Residents work on practical, everyday projects that are useful for them. This is often referred to as the “Participatory City approach.”

Is the new school of participatory systems and designs established by Participatory City Foundation bringing together all the research, knowledge and learning.

The publicly-accessible amenities, systems, physical places, spaces, platforms, services and organizations that shape how people interact, and which can support collective life.

The McConnell Foundation and others in Canada started to take notice of the success of the UK Participatory City experiments. In 2019, Participatory City UK, working in partnership with the McConnell Foundation, began conversations with partners in three Canadian cities, Halifax, Montreal, and Toronto, seeding an intention and creating a plan to develop, learn and explore feasibility of prototypes during a Social R&D phase. Throughout 2020 and early 2021, challenges emerged in implementation and learning due to the global COVID-19 pandemic resulting in significant changes to planning.

Firstly, the opportunity to visit Barking and Dagenham to learn through an arranged Study Trip became impossible. Secondly, COVID-19 encouraged the teams to consider designing and developing small live prototypes instead of larger, in-person activities. This made the feasibility testing more real, with the potential to start creating impact in these neighbourhoods during this phase of development.

The live prototypes were designed to maximise learning opportunities and to share knowledge and practices between the three cities. This was completed with an aim to test local responses to participation culture and to assess the emerging opportunities for building this type of participatory social infrastructure in these neighborhoods long term. The city teams worked closely through digital means to create these prototypes during this exploration phase in the three Participatory Canada cities, with a longer term goal of building each city into a learning hub to effectively scale the Participatory City approach in Canada.

Each city has brought a unique structure and perspective to the Participatory Canada initiative. Halifax is leveraging the platform to conduct meaningful reconciliation through participation, Montreal is building strong relationships with local governments and alignment with the Participatory City approach, and Toronto is using their deep networks and physical space for community experiments.

Figure 2 - Potential global learning campuses for the Participatory City approach at the Here&Now School of Participation Systems and Design

Participatory City is continually growing and evolving its ethos. It is a system that is organic and deeply collaborative, creating something greater than the sum of the individual parts. Relationships of participants and organizations are higher order and go beyond partnership agreements. Each city iteration helps the Participatory City approach cascade its development and learning, scaffolding knowledge and infrastructure. Essentially, it gets better and can grow faster each time; new implementations can leapfrog ahead as more infrastructure elements are developed.

The path forward for the Participatory City approach is very different from traditional models of scaling that only focus on replication and adaptation. This approach is intrinsically adaptive in the way it has been designed. It is building a transdisciplinary field of practice that requires deep collaboration and a unique way of thinking and working together. The complex nature of these new projects and systems that co-create and grow participation culture requires continual iteration, reflection and development, making this work highly additive in nature. The elements of the Participatory City approach have been and will continue to be co-created by all, making them accessible and available through open source sharing through Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Everyone becomes custodians of the Participatory City approach. Its work and learning, helping it to be bigger, better, richer, and more knowledge infused each time it gets developed in a new place (see Figure 3).

When a new city embarks on their Participatory City journey, they join a network of other cities who are building and layering on the existing progress of the Participatory City approach. This includes the structures, methods, models and strategies needed to co-create the support infrastructures and participatory ecosystems. The richness of each city’s local culture, ideas and experiences combine with them in a completely new and adaptive way. Ultimately, Participatory City aims to work with partner cities to develop a growing portfolio of participatory approaches and knowledge (see Figure 7 below for the Top Six Essential Components for Scaling Systems in New Places). Cities will be able to spend time on projects in deep collaboration, developing systems of support, curriculum and architectures of learning.

Figure 3 - Cascading and scaffolding the development, learning, knowledge and infrastructure of the Participatory City approach

Figure 4 - Convening Session 1, discussing the 10 year vision of the Participatory City approach in Canada

Working with Participatory City Foundation in the UK, the emerging global School Here&Now, and the Social R&D phase in Canada, Participatory Canada will co-create a strategy and implementation pathway that focuses on developing a learning, knowledge and capacity building model, and fosters deep working and learning partnerships needed to make this ambition aim possible. Two models that were considered and rejected because they were not a good fit to achieve the ambition included a “topdown organisation to deliver formulaic and imported participation systems across multiple cities’’, and a “franchise model with tight controls and limited adaptation capabilities’’. Due to the adaptive design nature of the Participatory City approach, it will continue to build forward with local Canadian communities in ways that are context appropriate. It is currently envisaged that each city could build local partnerships, such as for funding and investment, and Participatory Canada would support achieving the desired impacts through a connected network of cities in Canada to ensure a high level of quality and integrity to the approach. Participatory Canada will be central to knowledge building and codifying emerging testing and insights across the Learning Campuses in each city. They will support residents, neighborhoods, communities and cities to connect and fuse these with their local networks, and deep community knowledge and understanding, through the ongoing co-design, embedding, and developmental evaluation processes.

A method of collectively surfacing initial ideas and applying shared knowledge in design thinking, whether it is a project, a session, a task, or a solution to a problem.

The 10 year vision in Canada, developed at Wasan Island in 2019, is still compelling and viable, even more so following the experiences and learning over the last year through COVID-19 (see Figure 4). Participatory Canada infrastructure could respond to the needs of communities by providing a platform to amplify efforts and remove barriers to practical collaboration and by deeply embedding learning and evaluation. At a neighbourhood level, developing in-person, participatory culture and experiences will create the opportunity for Canadian communities to recover from COVID-19 while focusing on the essential aspects of life that will help to build resilience to future crises. The potential pathways to achieve this ambition are explored in this roadmap.

As part of the Social R&D process, Participatory Canada wanted to understand demand in the field and conditions for scaling the Participatory City approach in Canada. As part of this exploration, Participatory Canada commissioned a series of strategy sessions in late 2020 and early 2021, to align around scaling demand and possibilities (Dec. 10, 2020), learning architecture (Jan. 15, 2021), and financing (Jan. 28, 2021). (Refer to Appendix A for materials from those sessions, including a list of session participants). The outputs from the sessions were used to develop a Participatory Canada Roadmap and related scenarios. This report is the culmination of those sessions, accompanied by the initial reflections of the Participatory Canada Team on the direction of potential future strategy and building of a scaled initiative in Canada.

The Participatory Canada Roadmap is meant to be used as a key data point in decision making and next steps by the Participatory Canada Team, along with current and potential partners. It is meant to provide context and support around sequencing and strategic decisions on resources, such as when and how to deliver programs and onboard support for new cities. It is not meant to be a complete or definitive model for the future development and implementation of Participatory Canada. This report reflects a possible direction for further development and implementation of the Participatory City approach in Canada and incorporates multiple perspectives, factors and suggestions from the wider partnership, city leads, and interested groups from the three sessions and through individual interviews. It identifies key themes, gaps, constraints, assumptions, implications, and opportunities that will need to be considered over the 1, 5 and 10 year path of scaling implementation. The Participatory Canada Roadmap puts forward choices to help frame the path and direction of Participatory Canada.

The Participatory Canada Roadmap connects to other streams of work being completed, such as the Developmental Evaluation on the experiences of the three city experiments and the core Participatory Canada Team. These inputs culminate in the larger Participatory Canada foundational document, the Social R&D Report (see Figure 5). In a connected way, these other documents and learning elements (such as the Theory of Change and learning sprints) will form the broader picture of strategic recommendations and operational planning to be undertaken by the Participatory Canada Team through discussion, and insights.

While the current prototypes in Halifax, Montreal, and Toronto in Canada have some programming that is operational, they will need to fully launch their programs to understand more deeply how this approach works and to envisage the potential impact and outcomes of local participation. These include building the relationships to people living in those neighbourhoods, and how these relate to organizations and governments, as well as the learning platforms. Through these prototypes the aim has been to create the initial evidence base and support for developing long term practical participation ecosystems. Figure 5 - How the Participatory Canada Roadmap connects to other Participatory Canada outputs