Umeå's Climate City Contract

"What if we turned a contract into a collective experience where different perspectives would meet, confront, and acknowledge eachother as part of a broader whole?" 

The Climate City Contract is a design-driven process focusing on the co-creation of alternative ways of working together, promoting the ability to respond together while exploring ways for building resilient collaborative practices. 

While the European Commission's mission for 100 climate-neutral cities, Umea has been a frontrunner in the green transition. In this complex, multi-layered journey, sustainability is approached as a systemic, polyphonic outcome. 
The city of Umeå was already committed to developing a co-creative process formalised in a Climate City Contract in the broader framework of the Viable Cities' programme. While the need to build pathways to cross-sectoral collaboration was growing, the main challenge soon became about developing means to acknowledge the complexity of — and our entanglement with — systemic challenges.

The collaboration step in the formulation of a Climate City Contract in the city of Umeå has been nurtured by design-driven practices that fostered actionable systemic perspectives, resulting in the design and facilitation process of 3 cross-disciplinary roundtable conversations.