Co-designing Neighbourhood-Level Social Improvement and Innovation

This chapter examines how community actors can initiate and sustain the co-design of social improvement and innovation at the neighbourhood level. It argues that political leaders in both the public and private non-profit sectors may enhance input and output legitimacy by involving local citizens in the co-creation of solutions that promote local well-being. The theoretical framework draws a conceptual distinction between co-production and co-creation and explains how the construction of institutional platforms can support the formation of arenas for co-creation of public value outcomes. The empirical analysis looks at a local experiment in a general housing association in Denmark that aims to combine its traditional representative democracy with new forms of participatory and deliberative democracy in order to build trust and create joint ownership over more or less innovative solutions.