Report on the co-design and evaluation outcomes
Creators: name: Condotta, Massimiliano
name: Scanagatta, Chiara
name: Peron, Fabio
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2020
Subjects: co-creation
air pollution
Verona

description: <strong>The first loop co-design phase</strong> of the Verona Looper Living Lab (LLL) took place between September 2018, when the first meeting on how to organise the workshops happened, and February 2019, when the implementation of the proposed solutions was done. On the 12<sup>th</sup> of July 2018 there was the first transition moment when the data visualisation platform was presented, with a press conference, to spread the word that the platform was online and working. This online platform was the basis on which the co-design activity later took place. The Looper project then took a break during August 2019 as participants were on summer break. At the beginning of September 2019 there was a meeting between the Italian project partner in order to organise the workshop, and on the 5<sup>th</sup> of October 2018 the first workshop took place. During the first workshop of the 5<sup>th</sup> of October 2018 about 20 people participated, this included some council-employed who were there to lay out the ideas of the Municipality and to discuss technical details of the ideas proposed by citizens. This workshop was also used to visualise the data with participants to have a feedback on the feasibility of the platform, but also to better understand if participants correctly understood the data shown. After the data visualisation there was an interesting moment of dialogue between participants which could express their thoughts on the real situation and the differences they found between the data they collected and their perception of the situation. The other activity done during the first workshop was a presentation of good practices that can be found around the world to implement small-low budget solutions to create aggregation spaces and reduce traffic related pollutants. After these activities the actual co-design started and the approach was that of using printed maps, transferable paper and projected Google Earth and Street Maps views to help participants in better visualising the areas. The idea was to concentrate on the places were the co-monitoring took place in order to mostly focus on the areas with the most data collected, this both because participants already thought of implementing mitigation solutions in these places and also to have more chances in seeing differences with the second co-monitoring campaign. To conclude the first co-design workshop the co-design online tool was presented. This tool is a pre-set one by Urbanista, later embedded in the local Looper webpages, with a user-friendly interface and just few simple options to allow people proposing their ideas also outside the workshop’s timings. To submit an idea it was mandatory to select a category (i.e. greenspaces or traffic/mobility for the Verona LLL), give the idea a short title, give the description of the idea and insert the name/nickname. Apart from this fields it was also possible to upload an image (which gave some issues as per a bug from the tool), to choose a position for the idea within the area of Verona Sud and to add the email, if the person wanted to be contacted. After submitting the idea was possible to see it on the map at the beginning of the page, if the position was added, and/or on the list right underneath the map itself. The second workshop took place on the 17<sup>th</sup> of October 2018 about 15 people participated, and this included a couple of council-employed who also participated at the previous workshop. The workshop begun with a recap of what was done during the previous event, and all of the idea proposed the 5<sup>th</sup> of October were shown on the co-design online platform. This was also to tell participants that there actually was an open online storage to keep track of was they were doing within the framework of the project. After the recap of the previous meeting ended the organisers showed to participants the ideas added online after the first workshop, and a debate on the newly proposed ideas took place within the participants. Later on the face-to-face idea proposal continued from where it sopped on the previous workshop (on the first one about 7 out of 19 spots had been discussed) and some new ideas were brought to attention from new participants, but also by people who participated at the previous meeting. The workshop then ended with only a few places left to be discussed, and this gave space to explain to participants the third, and last, workshop would have focused on concluding the debated on the last few spots, checking ideas added on line and defining a maximum number of ideas which would be the most important to be implemented in order to take those to the policymakers to find the right way to implement these. This would also help in the analysis and evaluation of the chosen solutions to prioritize them from a research point of view. The third workshop took place on the 31<sup>st</sup> of October 2018, again about 15 people participate with a couple of council employed. The first half of this last workshop took place as like in the second one: activities focused on the recap of previous meetings, discussion on new ideas added online and discussion on possible ideas for the last few places from the co-monitoring campaign left to be discussed. The second half of the workshop was then all about choosing top 15 ideas that participants thought were the most efficient and feasible from an objective point of view first and then from a citizen and policymakers’ point of view. Because of this dialogue moment the Verona LLL didn’t do the sustainable MCA analysis and moved straight forward to the MAMCA. In the end 14 ideas were chosen to be analysed and then implemented, citizens asked to add a couple of ideas they knew could hardly be implemented in the framework of the Looper project. This was because they wanted to have an official track of their long-term requests. As the Verona LLL case has such a wide area to cover, when researchers moved to the MAMCA tool there was the need to aggregate and generalise the ideas, this was because the MAMCA works on the comparison between ideas to be applied in the same place. That is why there was a shift from proposals, which were the 14 ideas chosen with the workshops, to alternatives, groups of ideas that could be evaluated by the MAMCA tool. The MAMCA evaluation considered three groups of stakeholders: citizens, Legambiente (NGO partner of the project) and local government (Comune di Verona part of the project). The criteria and weights given by each stakeholder was then evaluated by experts to give scores to the alternatives compared to criteria and stakeholders proposing them. The final results of the evaluation gave the prioritising of which ideas to implement first. It was interesting to see how the MAMCA results were the same of the ones from the confrontation from the last workshop. <strong>The second loop co-design phase</strong> of the Verona Looper Living Lab (LLL) took place between July 2019, when the initial co-design meeting happened, and January 2020, when the first proposed solution for implementation was publicly presented in a press conference made by the Comune di Verona. The first co-design workshop took place on the 3<sup>rd</sup> of July 2019, and about 20 people participate. This was supposed to be a workshop to define with participants how to face the second loop, based on the data collected during the monitoring campaign. Participants were not fully satisfied with the low impact of the ideas implemented within the first loop. For this reason, they were still keen to work on the criticalities already found during the first loop. Consequently, the meetings of the second loop focused mainly on the co-design activity and only part of them where dedicated to the problem identification. This first meeting then was based on the data from the monitoring activity (measuring of air pollution and noise pollution after the implementation of selected mitigations solutions of the firs loop). After discussing the monitoring results, it was decided to shift to the co-design of longer-term solutions (instead of small and isolated solutions), that could also work as pilot cases to be further replicated within the urban environment. This did not mean that participants abandoned what was done during the first loop, but rather that they re-designed such implemented ideas with a better community vision on the issues. During this first meeting it was defined what ideas were to be further implemented, and it was started to define how to implement them. By the end of the meeting it was decided to wait longer before a second workshop, to better visualise data and understand if this approach could be the right one. This activity was left free for the participants to make. The second workshop was done on the 4th of December 2019, and participants confirmed that they wanted to continue with what said during the previous meeting. Furthermore, they told organisers that they were ready to better explain their concepts for the implementation of the four proposed solutions: creation of aggregation spaces through the closure of neighbourhood streets; creation of an urban forest in compartments 1 and 2 near Parco Santa Teresa; create a dialogue with Autostrade per l'Italia S.p.A. about possible noise reduction systems; further implementation of crosswalk islands. The work done during the workshop was that of refining the ideas, with the help of the technical expertise of some employee from the Comune di Verona, and it was set a draft of the official document to be presented by the organisers to policymakers. By the end of the meeting, participants asked to organisers to make a final version of the document in order to book an official meeting with policymakers. This meeting was to check if policymakers would endorse the proposed ideas within the agenda of the Comune di Verona, and organisers had to then report to the Verona Looper Living Lab the outcome of this meeting. On 19<sup>th</sup> of December 2019 the organizers of Living Labs had a meeting with policymakers to illustrate some of the ideas produced by the Living Lab. It was a successful moment of sharing since the administrators accepted the proposed ideas, and they defined that each idea was to be officially presented with a press conference as soon as the main timing would be defined. On the 3<sup>rd</sup> of January 2020 the first idea about the expansion of Parco Santa Teresa with an urban forest was announced. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic the second loop implementation is now (July 2020) on hold, with the aim of continuing the work to be able to implement the selected ideas.