Climate City Contract 2030

Nurturing cross-sectoral co-response-ability in sustainable transformation practices.

Building on notions of thriving together, making kin and communing, the formulation of a Climate City Contract in the city of Umeå, Sweden, sparked from designerly practices drawing from embodied sensemaking. With the aim of fostering actionable systemic perspectives that allow for co-response-ability in the sustainable transformation processes, the outcomes of this work point toward the need of nurturing the ability to respond together and propose ways for building resilient collaborative practices.

The quest of the project is set in the city of Umeå, Sweden, one of the 23 municipalities developing “a multi-level and co-creative process formalized in a Climate City Contract (CCC), adjusted to the realities of each one of them, […] aiming at the shared goal of the mission” (European Commission, 2020). The context of Umeå’s Climate City Contract provided the authors with the opportunity to approach not only the “what”, but the “how” specifically through a Research through Design (RtD) approach.

The main aim of this project is to contribute to creating alternative collaborative practices that develop means to acknowledge the complexity of – and our entanglement with – systemic challenges. This ties into such an opportunity by engaging in a European initiative that explicitly acknowledges the need to experiment with alternative forms of contractual relationships aimed at bridging global goals and local responses to tackle the climate crisis.

In fact, with the engagement of the design unit in RISE, Research Institutes of Sweden, the process, and its complexity have been handled through designerly means: here, the aesthetic engagement delivered through forms, compositions and assemblages triggered specific behaviors, contributing to provoke and establish forms of interconnectedness, empowering participants towards forms of co-response-ability within a system.

Emerging skills from this project is described as increased resilience, cross-sectoral collaboration, co-response-ability and communing.

Designers: Maria Claudia Coppola, Rosa van der Veen and Ambra Trotto.