ENGAGEMENT BUILDING BLOCKS

En route to achieving climate neutrality, you will need to engage with citizens and urban stakeholders across your city.

The Engagement Building Blocks offer a visual, collaborative, and playful way to learn and implement frameworks for designing such an engagement process.

It can be used to explore alternative ways forward, assess needs, and reach agreement on key aspects between different stakeholders before you start the detailed design.

Before you begin

In short, this tool helps to consider and evaluate the different elements that affect how best to build this process and takes you step by step through different choices that need to be made. The result is the framework of the design of the engagement process. It provides insights into which basic building blocks can best be used to build a specific engagement process.

It can be used to explore alternative ways forward, assess needs, and reach agreement on key aspects between different stakeholders before you start the detailed design. With experience, it can also become an extremely useful, go-to tool to support the actual co- creation and design of those engagement processes.

The tool consists of four card decks:

• The first two (goals and context) are the analytical phase. Here the focus is on which challenge the engagement should respond to and the constraints and opportunities in the specific context.
• The last two decks (design choices and methods) are the visioning phase. This phase looks at the choices for building the engagement process.

Who is this tool for?

This tool can be used in diverse environments where engagement processes are being considered and elements for a successful design are being evaluated. That said, it is best applied within city teams.

Including more and different perspectives in your use of the Building Blocks, will offer a better and more precise view of the factors which will have an impact on your engagement process.

Helpful Tip: The Engagement Building Blocks add the most value when you bring together people with diverse expertise and perspectives (such as when working with multiple city departments) or when working with other people who value interactive approaches.