Co-designing infrastructures: Working with communities to create resilient cities

Abstract

Developing and delivering infrastructures that support healthy, sustainable, resilient cities is an urgent task. This chapter explores the intersection of creativity and the built environment in co-design, addressing the contested nature of urban communities and the obduracy of infrastructure systems. The Bottom-Up Infrastructure model draws on movements and disciplines such as participatory design, metadesign, and systems engineering as the basis for a six-step design method and a set of associated tools. The six steps are: setting aims, characterising communities, capturing requirements, analysing options, crafting solutions, and evaluation. The method was applied to the design of a roofto..