Co-Production Boundaries of Nature-Based Solutions for Urban Regeneration: The Case of a Healthy Corridor

Abstract

Co-production, rooted in public collaborative management (Ostrom, 1996) or science and technology (Jasanoff, 2013) evolution, has demonstrated its innovative and transformative character within participatory processes. However, there is little empirical evidence that scrutinises these contexts of interaction. Equality of partnership in many cases is used as a discursive rhetoric that seeks to prescribe co-production above any difficulty, uncertainty, conflict, or unwanted situation. As a starting point, our proposal considers co-production as a social practice, composed of multiple layers and different participatory processes, activities, and strategies. Grounded in co-production approaches, the study draws upon the ongoing evaluation findings of the European project URBiNAT, which focuses on inclusive urban regeneration through nature-based solutions. The qualitative methods of evaluation (interviews and participant observation), applied during the co-production activities in the city of Porto (Portugal), provide evidence of how the various stakeholders—elected politicians, citizens, technicians, and researchers—participate in the co-production dynamic. The boundaries of a multi-stakeholder process are revealed with the goal of implementing healthy corridors in peripheral neighbourhoods. The intended evaluation analysis lies in the techniques, the agents, the dynamics, the knowledge, and the degrees of co-production. This analysis will contribute to the lack of explicit consideration of the impacts of nature-based solutions in urban regeneration pathways, especially those related to the social fabric underlined in Dumitru et al. (2020).