The REFLOW Collaborative Governance Framework
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Our design framework looks at governance as a process of infrastructuring, understood as ‘the socio-technical scaffolding around which organizational and personal collaborative networks and relationships are built, including the ways of working, structures, artifacts, activities and attitudes that contribute to creating a supportive framework for both present and future collaboration’ (Manzini and Thorpe, 2018).
The framework (Figure 2) is visualized as a pie chart where the segments reflect three core areas of impact, while the three concentric circles describe three core layers of the infrastructuring process:
Articulating a long term strategic vision and roadmap towards meaningful impacts across social, economic and environmental sustainability;
Defining and developing a full-stack portfolio of experiments - i.e. across regulation, economic case, finance, capacity-building, engagement, tech, etc. - that form a holistic and systemic plan for the transition to circular and regenerative cities
Defining the relational ecosystem and governance arrangements that sustain co-creative and collaborative transition pathways to circular and regenerative cities.
Therefore, this framework goes towards the definition of a loose coordination model that organizes collaboration across three main dimensions of infrastructuring, i.e. strategic, operational and relational, these interacting continuously with each other and contributing to forming the actual shape of the social, cultural and economic fabric of the city. Moreover, as we will see in the Design Journey, the framework acknowledges the processual dimension of urban governance, concentrating not only on how the three layers interact with and mutually reinforce each other, but also depicting an open-ended design process that embeds learning by doing as a means to improve scale and scope of collaboration over time. So conceived, the framework is essentially a ‘thinking’ map that - especially in early phases - may help frame collaborative governance arrangements that leave space for both pre-identified goals and activities, as well as for new goals and activities to emerge and plug in the system over time.
In the transition towards circular and regenerative cities, this framework can be used as an inception tool that helps organize, activate and coordinate not only those levers that are deemed essential to kickstart the transition, and which are often under the domain of public entities; more than that, it can account for the constellation of all those projects and initiatives, often distributed in cities and grassroots-led, that can meaningfully contribute to the transition.
