Enhancing city vitality by building platforms for interactive political leadership: Experiences and results from a longitudinal design experiment

Efforts made by cities to enhance their vitality are often hampered by local councilors failing to set the political agenda, define pressing problems, and design and implement solutions that spur social cohesion, cultural creativity, and sustainable development. Experimentation with new forms of interactive political leadership may offer a solution by soliciting valuable input from affected citizens. Focusing on a Danish frontrunner municipality, this article reports on a longitudinal design experiment aimed at designing a platform for interactive political leadership and improving the functioning of the arenas for co-created policymaking that it supports. The analysis builds on mixed methods, and the findings advance our knowledge of the institutional design of co-creation and the effectiveness of new forms of citizen participation. The article concludes that design experiments can both produce context-dependent scientific knowledge about what works and enable practitioners to improve concrete efforts to enhance city vitality.