Organizing and facilitating Geodesign processes: Integrating tools into collaborative design processes for urban transformation

Urban landscapes are characterized by interrelated effects among multiple socioeconomic and ecological systems at different scales. Due to insufficient understanding of these effects, contemporary developments in many cities and agglomerations result in urban landscape conditions seriously affecting environmental quality and human well-being. Enabling social learning and collective actions, and Geodesign approaches applying systems thinking using geographic knowledge, are regarded the keys to an urban transformation, which can better provide qualities valued and needed by society. Yet, there is little knowledge of how to organize and facilitate suitable processes. This article presents a procedural concept for integrating Geodesign into collaborative design processes using the example of a study in the Limmattal region in Switzerland. People's values frame the deliberative process over future urban development possibilities as well as the scientific methods and the choices they include for demand analysis, option design, analysis of impacts of change, and trade-off analysis of conflicting values. The results of this study show how the different methods are made interoperable to provide deeper insights into people's demands, drivers of urban transformation and impacts of possible interventions on urban quality. Continual testing, demonstration and redesigning as time progresses are considered essential to accomplish urban transformation of higher quality. As the scientific methods and the process are inextricably linked, they should be further developed closely together. Thus, collaborative platforms should be established to foster ongoing design processes on the regional landscape development, coming along with a monitoring of social learning effects and the effectiveness of the methods.