Beyond Maintenance: Co-Creating Flourishing Urban Green and Blue Spaces

Beyond Maintenance: Co-Creating Flourishing Urban Green and Blue Spaces

Project concept

Urban green and blue spaces are essential for climate resilience, biodiversity, public well-being and urban life. Yet their long-term care is often approached primarily as a technical or administrative maintenance task. This project proposes a shift: from routine maintenance towards collaborative, adaptive and community-based stewardship.

The project explores how municipalities, researchers, civil-society organisations and local communities can work together to develop more resilient and flourishing urban green and blue spaces.

Our approach

The project builds on the Flourishing Contexts framework, which understands sustainable collective action as emerging from the conditions that enable people and organisations to participate, connect, learn and act together.

Its approach brings together four interconnected foundations:

• Awareness: developing a shared understanding of local ecological and social conditions.

• Connection: strengthening relationships among municipalities, communities and other stakeholders.

• Integrative Balance: connecting ecological, social and institutional dimensions of urban care.

• Meaning: developing shared purpose and a sense of collective responsibility.

Through generative dialogue, collective sensemaking and learning, the project aims to support the transition from fragmented maintenance practices to collaborative long-term stewardship.

Empirical grounding

The project is informed by the experience of Cheshmeh Goftogu (Spring of Dialogue), a community-based urban initiative in Mashhad, Iran. This experience demonstrates how a neglected urban space can become a setting for participation, dialogue, shared responsibility and collective transformation.

What we are looking for

We welcome collaboration with:

• Universities and research organisations working on urban ecology, green and blue infrastructure, climate adaptation and urban governance.

• Municipalities willing to contribute pilot sites and practical experience.

• Civil-society organisations and community groups experienced in participation and co-creation.

• Experts in nature-based solutions, biodiversity, urban planning and innovative maintenance practices.

Potential contributions

The project seeks to develop and test approaches for:

• Community participation in the long-term care of urban green and blue spaces.

• Co-creation and dialogue between local authorities and communities.

• Collaborative stewardship models and governance arrangements.

• Collective learning, evaluation and adaptive management.

• Integrating ecological objectives with social well-being and local meaning.

Invitation

We are looking for eligible European partners interested in developing a collaborative proposal under DUT Call 2026, CUE Topic 2: Innovative maintenance of urban green and blue spaces.

We particularly welcome municipalities and research organisations interested in developing practical pilot activities and testing new approaches to long-term urban stewardship.

Project initiator: Mohsen Mousavi-Zadeh
Email: mousavizade.mohsen@gmail.com