Coboi Urban Lab Traineeship 2

Background of the Traineeships

In October 2020, Coboi Lab organised the second of two Urban Lab traineeships with 25 online participants, using Zoom as a digital space for collaboration.

The traineeships led by Coboi Lab aimed to share a methodology to tackle social challenges as the tool to carry out transformative projects in the City of Sant Boi de Llobregat. These events are intended to generate an ecosystem of actors who are interested in initiating social change in the city, both inside and outside the City Council, to increase the capacity for collaboration.  

Sant Boi de Llobregat City Council has started a process to reactivate the city – the traineeship two events marked the beginning of this process. Some actors who participated in the city pact joined the Traineeships to learn how to conduct multi-stakeholder processes of collaboration and co-creation. The event welcomed a range of voices to both of the traineeships events that included public officials, technicians from Sant Boi’s City Council, and Barcelona City. People from within Coboi Lab’s network who facilitate collaborative processes within their context also participated.

The Format:

The first part of the event focused on communicating the value of Urban Lab, inclusive Communities of Practice to co-create solutions, and validating the work and value of Urban Labs, Coboi Lab for the City of Sant Boi. During the session, two speakers talked about Public Innovation, Creative Bureaucracy, and the importance of building ecosystems for collaboration to create inclusive and sustainable solutions. 

Speakers included:

Lindsay Cole is the Solutions Lab Manager at the City of Vancouver and a PhD candidate and Public Scholar at the University of British Columbia. She is working with the City of Vancouver to create and evaluate new methods of finding breakthrough and transformative solutions to some of the cities most complex and significant issues, while building and deepening relationships along the way. 

Talk theme: Four provocations for Urban Labs.

Charles Landry is an international authority on the use of imagination and creativity in urban change. He is currently a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. He invented the concept of the Creative City. Its focus is on how cities can create the enabling conditions for people and organizations to think, plan, and act with imagination to solve problems and develop opportunities. The notion has become a global movement and changed the way cities thought about their capabilities and resources. He also organizes the ‘creative bureaucracy’ festival with more than 150 speakers.

Talk theme: Creative Bureaucracy

The second part of the traineeship took a more practical approach and was divided into two sessions where participants experimented with some of the tools included in the methodology, using the same hypothetical societal challenge from the first traineeship. 

The practical exercises took place in small groups of 4-5 participants working with four facilitators, one for each group. A group discussion at the end of the session addressed two current critical factors for Coboi Lab that will be included in their methodology – ‘implementation and evaluation of solutions’.