MULTIGINATION

The pilots and demonstrators are developed to test and refine the Multigination method in the Turkish city of Basaksehir and the Swiss city of Winterthur, in collaboration with local Living Labs and urban planning departments. The method develops in three main phases to progressively transform stakeholders into active contributors of the global urban transition projects.

Phase 1 – Co-imagination: Facilitators meet diverse stakeholders in public spaces with the open-source visual collective intelligence digital platform Unlimited Cities. Hundreds of creative collages commented by their authors are collected and shared in real time.

Phase 2 – Integration: Living Labs and urban planning departments enrich the global project through bottom-up contributions and propose variations for voting. The vote is organized to collect stakeholder comments. Several thousand to tens of thousands of participants.

Phase 3 – Deployment: Co-designed micro-projects are built with mixed funding. They provide proof of urban transition progress and mutual listening between municipality and stakeholders. An action framework is established so the three phases reproduce according to project advancement.

Sharing an efficient open-source innovation for urban transition, easily adoptable by municipalities.

The Multigination consortium brings together researchers and urban planners. We understand how urban transitions are conceived strategically and globally to calculate sustainability performance, then divided into increasingly smaller entities like silos to apply the global vision. We also know the difficult work of sector urban planners who bear responsibility for transformation project timelines and costs.

This professional knowledge allows the consortium to understand that a top-down orchestrated system for transforming territories does not initially have the conceptual, temporal, and financial space to integrate an innovation as disruptive as Multigination, which proposes using the direct connection between bottom-up and top-down approaches.

This is why a key point of the Multigination method is to closely associate local Living Labs and urban planning departments in Winterthur (Switzerland) and Basaksehir (Turkey), who provide essential feedback to improve the approach and ensure it has a real impact on the success of urban transition.

Available results 

As explained briefly above, we start from an initial situation where urban transition is essentially top-down, where stakeholder contributions are difficult to take into account because the urban transition production system has not integrated this dimension.

To enable a real impact in urban transitions, a mindset shift is needed from both stakeholders and municipalities. Stakeholders often question whether their contributions will be valued if they're uncertain their input will be used, while municipalities ask whether it's worth organizing participatory processes when the value and quality of collected input is unknown.

The Winterthur contributory workshop demonstrated that stakeholders (businesses, citizens, researchers, social workers) were highly motivated to contribute once they understood the global method once they understood the global method proposed by Multigination. Results analysis showed the city that stakeholders who were free to choose their topics produced interesting contributions aligned with urban transition issues, since 78% of the 73 collected ideas were directly linked to decarbonization.

Results are available here: https://www.openurbanism.ch/fr/group/16/stream

Using the Multigination Method

The entire Multigination project is shared under open licenses to maximize accessibility and reuse. These licensing choices support transparency, collaboration, and the widest possible impact for dissemination.

All content and visuals are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

This allows anyone to share, remix, transform, and build upon the material—even for commercial purposes—as long as they give appropriate credit and distribute any adapted materials under the same license.

All software developed for the project is released under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (GNU AGPL v3) (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html), ensuring freedom to use, modify, and redistribute the software, with the requirement that any modified versions remain open source under the same license terms.