Conclusion

The Participatory Canada Roadmap advises on the direction of potential future strategy through growth and scaling of the Participatory City approach in Canada. The Participatory Canada Team, along with current and potential partners, will use the information captured in the strategic convening sessions, accompanied by their initial reflections on the Roadmap, as key data points to inform sequencing and implementation for strategic planning that will occur in early 2021. The goal will be to use the Roadmap for the long term planning by the core team to inform the possible future directions for further development and implementation of the Participatory City approach in Canada.

The Roadmap identified key themes, gaps, constraints, assumptions, implications, and opportunities that will need to be considered by the Participatory Canada team over the 1, 5 and 10 year path of growing and scaling implementation. They will need to consider how to ensure balanced growth over the next decade of the six essential components of vision, context, learning architecture, school, resources, and evidence in scaling practical participatory ecosystems while ensuring coordination, communication and relationships also grow proportionally and sufficiently to support the growing network of cities across Canada. Similarly, focusing on people in the near term, sustainable financing in the medium term, and networks in the long term will support scaffolding in the growth and scaling pathway.

Through the three strategic convening sessions, many points of alignment were identified between the participants, city experiment teams, and the existing principles of the Participatory City approach to also support systemic growth and scaling. These elements of consensus should serve as initial design principles for Participatory Canada to be observed by the city and national teams while designing and supporting the deep implementation city and subsequent smaller and medium sized city implementations. In-person learning, balanced by digital alternatives, will be foundational to the development of Participatory Canada. In the early phases, the focus and attention to the capabilities and capacity for local experts to adapt the Participatory City approach for Canadian city implementations will be critical. While immersive experiences will allow individuals and teams at the forefront of new city implementations to understand the intangible benefits of practical participation ecosystems, they will need to be balanced against the constraints of safety, to be overcome through modifications such as safe gatherings or digital programming to establish similar experiential learnings. The deep demonstration campus will be necessary for validation of the approach for potential partners, funders, and interested groups. Creating and proving success locally, combined with demonstrating the large impact of the approach (e.g. through poverty reduction, job creation, and decreased spending in health care) will help prove the model, ensuring sustainable financing and implementation for the long term.

While the Roadmap puts forward choices to help frame the path and direction of Participatory Canada, to support the vision and ambition of the approach and to respond to the growing interest from cities, the national and city implementation teams will need to effectively leverage the thought leadership and knowledge from the experiences in Barking and Dagenham, and the early learning from the Participatory Canada city prototypes. Additionally, the efforts to grow and scale the approach will need to center evaluation, learning and continuous improvement while factoring in the unique challenges and vision for Participatory Canada. Over the near, medium and long term, the considerations and choices suggested for growing and scaling the essential components will need to be thought through, tested and evaluated to refine a domestic pathway for growing and scaling the Participatory City approach in Canada. Underlining these considerations are assumptions and gaps where the national and city teams will need to further explore and assess how they may impact the inclusion of the Participatory City approach within communities.

The pathway for growing and scaling the Participatory City approach will hopefully be both exciting and systemic. Through the development and utilization of new impact measurement frameworks, Participatory Canada could become a leader in how to establish, embed, and finance participatory social infrastructure in Canada over the next decade, and beyond.