“CoprodAction: Addressing the coproduction of urban environment in Quito, Ecuador” is a research project is SOC -Social Science and Humanities Scientific area hold on by Institute of Regional Science (IfR) of KIT. It is an HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships action.
CoprodAction is seeking to better understand how people shape, negotiate, imagine and collaboratively manage their environments. Hence, the main research aim of CoprodAction is to understand to what extent the application of community-led practice influences or contributes to improve the coproduction of more sustainable and resilient urban environments. CoprodAction projects addresses three specific gaps, that are (i) the lack of empirical research about institutional environments allowing the coproduction of resilient and sustainable urban environments in marginalised neighbourhoods; (ii) the community-led coproduction of space has not been sufficiently explored as a viable solution capable to improve resilience and to face vulnerability and (iii) how self-organisation may activate alternative understandings of space and society and inspire novel epistemological paradigms for change and development, as well as informing the institutional practice of urban governance. Therefore, CoprodAction methodological approach addresses each of research objectives (ROs) and their relative applied methods and steps. Firstly, CoprodAction compares community-based practices with the official rhetoric on SDG and urban governance); more specifically, the research follows the methodological path of the critical policy analysis based on archival and desktop research, as well as socio-spatial analysis and in-depth interviews. This phase allows for the discovery of hidden knowledge, as well as theoretical and experiential frameworks that may not be fully apparent to those engaged in the field. In this way, documents, information, and policy and planning systems are brought to the surface, enabling comparisons with other case studies and illuminating both relative and absolute strengths and weaknesses. Secondly, it analyses the transformative potential of community-based urban planning and practices of coproducing by doing an extensive effort in further in-depth interviews, and extensive ethnographic research; moreover, the project will perform periodical collaborative mapping workshops with local stakeholders. This step provides insight into the real mechanisms of local co-production, alliances and rivalries, and the gears that enable the co-creation of sustainable habitat fragments as well as resilient community behaviour. In addition, it provides windows of theoretical and conceptual insight that are useful both for local academic circles and for international debate.
Finally, the third step consists in Co-designing a bottom-up model for the collaborative management of contested territories. This delicate phase, is developed by applying collaborative data analysis, stakeholder workshops, and, especially, by performing the long laboratory of co-production with stakeholders, public actors, and citizens. This final step, describes the present and future scenario of the collaborations, contributing to improve citizens' awareness of their territory with its potentials and fragilities, but also allows to arrive at proactive conclusions of shared territory management towards a more sustainable context and a community more aware of resilient behaviours. These results feed into planning guidelines both at the neighbourhood scale and at the municipal and metropolitan management level, thus contributing to the transferability of the results obtained.
