Co-designing with Public Administrators of 14 Climate-neutral-to-be Cities

The cross-disciplinary perspectives of urban public administrators and transition teams, who are at the forefront of climate action in cities, are crucial for developing relevant scientific knowledge towards tackling the complexities of systemic change required for reaching climate neutrality. Research through Co-design (RTC) (Busciantella-Ricci & Scataglini, 2023) is deployed in this study as it allows deriving real-world evidence from users' tacit knowledge that not only informs practice but also contributes to the growing body of academic knowledge in the cross-disciplinary domain of systemic transitions through radical urban planning. In this chapter, RTC is applied to investigate what are the most relevant functional needs and expectations of cities’ public administrators for climate dashboards which are necessary to support cities in planning and executing climate-neutral actions with a systemic approach. The functional needs of such a dashboard, developed from literature and experts' co-design sessions, function as visual design tools for the co-design session which was held with public administrators and members of cities' transition teams of 14 European cities. Results provide evidence of cities’ transition teams' needs and challenges regarding communication to activate the urban ecosystem and community engagement, uncovering novel needs compared to extant literature discourses.