URBAN CO-ACTION. The role of glocal climate action movements in a new adaptive co-design framework for urban resilience and ecological transition

The present research Thesis is part of a growing interdisciplinary field of studies concerned with finding strategies to foster ecosystem stewardship of social-ecological systems as complex adaptive systems, such as cities and, in particular, of those that involve the notion of participation and collaborative design, to effectively build resilience in the context of climate change and ecological crisis. Framed within other glocal climate action movements, as part of an increasing number of “urban climate change experiments”, often emerging outside formal contexts of decision-making and led by actors other than municipal government, the object of the present research is the globally growing socio-technological phenomenon of Civic/Green Hackathons, and of Climathon® in particular, an international 24-hour collaborative design event aimed developing solutions to tackle climate change in urban settings. Through the double lenses of social-ecological resilience and of participatory processes, with the objective of helping Urban Institutions in better coordinating, integrating and consolidating bottom-up contributions towards the achievement of pressing global targets of social-ecological resilience and sustainability, the findings of the present research have been used to develop a clear set of Recommendations for improving the ability to expand social-ecological resilience under conditions of uncertainty, and to understand the role and importance of Climathon® and of the other glocal climate action movements, in a new adaptive co-design framework for urban resilience and ecological transition. The proposed new framework is an heuristic model and pragmatic tool, implementable and replicable in other regulatory contexts and decision-making processes, addressed to Urban Institutions that have undertaken a path of resilience planning and ecological transition, to assist them in planning and managing participatory resilience planning processes more adaptively, and to facilitate their recognizing windows of opportunity to address change towards sustainable development and, in prospective, to foster active (Human) ecosystem stewardship through collective action, starting from cities.