The Power of Many

How city officials can use co-creation for Just and Sustainable Cities

Just transition, citizen engagement, fairness, equity, sustainability – city officials across Europe hear these words more and more often. While recognising their importance, many of them are struggling to fully integrate them into their daily work.

Cities and towns are the places where broad policy agendas intersect with people’s lives. It is the arena where responses to climate change become a reality. They are the closest level to citizens, and therefore, local governments have the potential to become a transformative force and enabler of cooperation.  However, these challenges can’t be solved by this actor alone. Local governments need different types of support from many different actors and tapping into innovation to catalyse local change. They need the power of many.

The word “many” in this book is not only about more people coming together, but also their knowledge, skills, experiences, smartness, perspectives, and personalities. It is about the transformative power that working together can bring. To unlock this power, what is needed the most is to facilitate the exchange of collective intelligence. The HOW is what you will find here.

This book shares practical guides, lessons, mistakes, and testimonies from EU cities that were part of the Fair Local Green Deals project. 

It is written for you, who work at a municipality and directly or indirectly with citizens. This includes city officials / civil servants who are part of the operational structure of a municipality and deal with the daily tasks of implementing policies in the territory. By extension, people who work with municipalities in any way can learn from these pages. We hope you open this book as many times as you need whenever support on those topics is searched for. We wish you good luck in your journey!

Franco, Laura & Daniel

Justice, Equity & Democracy team

ICLEI Europe

The Power of Many: How city officials can use co-creation for Just and Sustainable Cities