Organising for Co-production: Local Interaction Platforms for Urban Sustainability

Urban sustainability is a wicked issue unsuited to management through traditional decision-making structures. Co-productive arrangements, spaces and processes are inscribed in new organisational forms to bridge between diverse forms of knowledge and expertise. This paper suggests that local interaction platforms (LIPs) are innovative responses to these challenges, developed in two African and two European cities between 2010 and 2014. Through elaborating the design and practice of the LIPs, the paper concludes that the value of this approach lies in its context-sensitivity and iterative flexibility to articulate between internationally shared challenges and distinctive local practices. Six necessary conditions for the evolution of LIPs are presented: anchorage, co-constitution, context-sensitivity, alignment, connection and shared functions. In the context of increased uncertainty, complexity and the demand for transdisciplinary knowledge production, the platform concept has wider relevance in surfacing the challenges and possibilities for more adaptive urban governance.