In the last years, notions such as citizens’ participation and cross-sector collaboration are increasingly to be found in strategic documents at both local and EU levels about how to address contemporary urban challenges. At the same time an increasing number of initiatives (and labs) have been established by public administrations to practically experiment with how participatory and collaborative approaches can be used to address different kind of challenges (from social integration, to environmental sustainability). Suddenly, it appears as ideas (and practices) about participatory and collaborative governance are not anymore marginal proposals driven by activists or academics, but rather are “scaling up” and being adopted by civil servants and public institutions.

The seminar would like to articulate and discuss the nature of the “scaling”/”diffusion”/”adoption” of participatory and collaborative governance within public organizations operating on an urban scale. And the role (and responsibility) of participatory design researchers engaged in such a “scaling”/”diffusion”/”adoption”.

The starting point for the discussion will be an article draft, in which we dig into a case of (urban) participatory design we have been engaged with in the past 2 years. The case is the pilot of an upcycling center, a new waste handling service driven by a municipal waste handling organization. Here, citizens’ participation and cross-sector collaborations have been at play as approaches in the development of the pilot itself as well as core characteristics for the functioning and organizational model of the center itself.

We aim at highlighting both the practical and political issues that the “scaling”/”diffusion”/”adoption” of participation and collaboration entailed in this case. We look at how participation and collaboration got to travel, being translated, being adopted (but also resisted) among the different parties involved in the upcycling centre, but also what kind of tensions and frictions emerged in relation to both context-specific as well as “systemic” conditions. We focus also on who and what has been play a central role in the”scaling”/”diffusion”/”adoption” of participation and collaboration, how it has been a collaborative effort trespassing and pushing boundaries of organizations, communities, existing working practices and understandings of waste handling, citizens, public organizations but even of the notions of participation and collaboration. We also want to focus on the role of the participatory design researcher involved in collaborative boundary work: what kind of learnings but also dilemmas emerged so far.