TRUSTMAKING - Young creators and responsibilities for the new green transition

The "TRUSTMAKING" project is an active and applicable response to challenges emerged through the pandemic. This project enhances established Placemaking practices and aims at fostering confidence of youth to co-create urban spaces through creatively working in and with green infrastructures in four European cities. Establishing a trustful basis is key for well-informed, intergenerational and cross-sector collaboration with city governments, entrepreneurs and civil society organizations in the course of urban transformation processes. The project’s aim is to lay down cornerstones for EU cities-shaping professionals to act out trust-creating principles in their work while supporting youth in taking up their role as change makers of urban spaces. The goals of the project are (1) to initiate Urban Living Labs at four different sites in Austria, Lithuania, Norway, and The Netherlands, with a focus on youth in the four European cities, where (2) existing and new tools for youth co-creation of green infrastructure are identified and developed, and (3) cross-section collaboration and learning mechanisms through summer/winter schools are designed, in order to (4) develop guidelines of youth co-design and access of green infrastructures to increase capacities in public service for integrating youth's perspectives and their abilities to “bridge short-term concerns and long-term objectives” in urban transformation processes. The project will result in applicable principles for trust-building in public spaces. Since March 2022, partners have been working both locally and internationally to implement various activities. Our role at the beginning of the project has been to conduct quantitative surveys, gather information, collaborate interdisciplinary, and carry out activities with local stakeholders. We have engaged young people through Oslo Living Lab and conducted interviews about green infrastructure. The youth have participated in workshops and conducted analyses of Stensparken and Grønland. As part of the process, we have written blog posts about the activities. A workshop was organized with potential stakeholders, local youth organizations, and organizations working on green transition. Questions we discussed and wanted to learn more about were: What opportunities exist for youth to engage and influence green transition today? How can we ensure that young people trust that their engagement matters? If you had no limitations, what measures could you initiate to build trust among youth towards your organization? The results of this were documented and shared with our international partners. Additionally, the findings were presented during the Winter School in Vienna. Furthermore, Team Oslo has developed a document on dissemination and communication strategy for the project, which is used internally. Our part of the summer school was held in September. More information about this and other conducted activities can be found on our website, under blog posts: https://trustmaking.eu/?page_id=118 In collaboration with students from Hersleb Upper Secondary School’s Art, Design, and Architecture department, and the PBE’s Bykuben department, we have conducted numerous activities and shared knowledge on placemaking. Between December 2023 and September 2024, we met with the students 10-15 times for various activities and workshops. While the project followed a structured plan, the process and outcomes revealed several valuable insights. These insights focused on the role of youth as active citizens, building trust, and their perspectives on the spaces they engage with. After being presented with multiple options, the students chose to focus on Hersleb Upper Secondary School as their project site. Later, seven students were hired to continue their involvement and were compensated for their contributions. Their work included conducting interviews, mapping the schoolyard, and engaging in reflection and discussion about their findings. Together, they identified several key areas for improvement in the schoolyard, and we are now moving forward with implementing one of their ideas through physical construction. Additionally, we have engaged in meaningful interdisciplinary collaborations with our partners during the ‘Winter School Rotterdam’ and ‘Summer School Lithuania.’ These involved working with both partners and their local collaborators. Key findings from these collaborations will be included in the final report and published in the Trustmaking guidebook in February 2025.

The "TRUSTMAKING" project is an active and applicable response to challenges emerged through the pandemic. This project enhances established Placemaking practices and aims at fostering confidence of youth to co-create urban spaces through creatively working in and with green infrastructures in four European cities. Establishing a trustful basis is key for well-informed, intergenerational and cross-sector collaboration with city governments, entrepreneurs and civil society organizations in the course of urban transformation processes. The project aims at understanding the factors that determine the development of trust, more specifically with respect to youth. This engagement allows to transform core trust principles into context-specific actions and designs, while the method of Placemaking only implicitly takes trust into account. Trust-making through the means of infrastructure enhances Placemaking with a structure that explicitly (1) enables competencies needed for a particular place and (2) allows the comprehension of contested issues of transformation processes. This project seeks to foster confidence of youth to co-create urban spaces in transformation through creatively working in and with green infrastructures in four European cities and establishing a trustful basis for well-informed, intergenerational and cross-sector collaboration with policy makers, entrepreneurs, CSOs and urban governments in the course of urban transformation processes. Strategies for trust-building encourages to empower the most needed level of competence, therefore, the project aims at understanding the relationship between trust-creating principles and urban spaces to reveal the best framework. As youth is identified as one of the most alienated in this context, the co-research and co-creation approach is focused on the interaction of youth with public authorities through the everyday public infrastructure youth experiences.