A Spotlight of Co-creation and Inclusiveness of Public Open Spaces

This chapter focuses on co-creation as the way to engage different stakeholders with everyday urban environments based on equality, diversity and social cohesion. It presents the relationship of co-creation and inclusiveness of public open spaces together with different aspects of co-creation related to issues of publicness and space. It discusses why and how co-creation must take into consideration the characteristics of the comprehensive spatial development processes. It suggests that co-creation is a wider concept than co-design and is a multistage process that contributes to inclusive public spaces, providing measures for social sustainability of place. This chapter argues that digital tools may help to overcome challenges of co-creation and provide an opinion on the contribution of digital technologies to the co-creation process by engaging people in the design, use and management of public spaces, providing new resources for interaction and users’ empowerment. For that it presents an overview of the possible contribution of digital technologies to support inclusiveness of the co-creation processes that is structured by typologies of digital tools and their possible interlinking with the steps of the co-creation process. To improve the understanding of such possibilities it critically addresses strengths and weaknesses of using digital tools for co-creation and inclusiveness and provides recommendations for their further development.