Starting point
You are outside, living your life, waiting for a friend, leaving a shop, or perhaps standing outside your children's school. Someone approaches you with a tablet computer. Just an invitation: imagine your city differently, through a visual collage. Comment on it.
No official meeting. No set agenda. It just happens, that's all.
What Multigination Is
Its primary objective is to accelerate urban transitions. How? By connecting bottom-up and top-down approaches, ensuring neither dominates the other, through the mobilization of collaborative intelligence and transparent digital platforms.
The method is developed through collaborative research within the European Driving Urban Transitions program, with Finnish, Turkish, and Swiss partners, refined in pilot projects in Winterthur and Basaksehir, in collaboration with local Urban Living Labs and urban planning departments.
Core Challenges
Moving Beyond the Conventional Assignment of Scales
A hierarchical pattern dominates too often: citizens are invited to address small-scale, short-term, neighborhood-level issues, while strategic, long-term, citywide thinking and innovation remain reserved for experts and authorities.
Multigination demonstrates that citizens contribute valuable insights for large-scale transformation and that professionals gain new capabilities to engage with complex local realities.
Restoring Transparency that Enables Engagement
When participation processes do occur, the connection between citizen input and subsequent decisions often remains invisible. What happens to ambitious ideas when they reach the strategic level? How do professionals interpret them? Where do they shape outcomes? The data disappears. Trust erodes.
Multigination Principles
Structural Bridge Between Scales
The method proposes a sequence of phases that progressively connects local imagination with global strategy, avoiding the usual disconnection between citizen input and municipal decision-making.
Rather than treating local and global as separate concerns, the method treats them as inseparable dimensions of the same transformation. Citizen aspirations expressed locally illuminate strategic possibilities at city scale. Strategic frameworks give meaning to local action.
To paraphrase philosopher Edgar Morin, the local illuminates the global, which illuminates the local, which illuminates the global...
Collective Intelligence as Material for Decision-Making
The method mobilizes the creativity, knowledge, and lived experience of all actors—citizens, professionals, researchers, enterprises, associations—as material for informed decision-making.
This is not majority-rule democracy. It is the recognition that intelligence is distributed.
Resident know their neighborhood's microclimate, social networks, temporal rhythms in depth that no external expert can. A solar engineer understands distributed energy systems. Doctors, children, and urban planners should talk more often. A municipal official understands institutional capacities and constraints.
The question is not whose knowledge is valid for urban transition, but how to work with all of it simultaneously.
Adaptability Through Open Source Modularity
Each municipality can adapt the method to its specific context, using individual Multigination modules, combining them differently, or enriching them with local tools developed under open licenses. Modularity allows both coherence and adaptation.
The method develops in three main phases
Each integrating an open source digital tool:
- Co-imagination tool (small scale, engaging hundreds of contributors from public spaces)
- Vote tool (large scale, enabling thousands of participants to vote via the city's website)
- Crowdfunding and mixed financing tool (supporting independent grassroots and private urban transition initiatives with values-based resonance with city urban transition objectives)
Phase 1: Establishing Conditions and Co-Imagination
This phase allows the establishment of a relationship of trust and the gathering of qualitative and diverse data on the perceptions of civil society and stakeholders.It takes place at the level of neighbourhoods.
Contributions are open-ended, covering highly practical and functional or utopian elements, in the short term and the long term...
Organisation of phase 1
- Sharing the method with the municipality, presenting different case studies.
- The municipality and urban planners identify high-stakes areas to organize contributory workshops and deploy the co-imagination tool.
- The number of contributory workshops is typically defined between 2 and 4, and ideas for inviting diverse audiences are shared.
Contributory Workshops
- The process begins with ateliers held with local stakeholders—residents, municipal departments, associations, enterprises, researchers. These workshops serve to: Contextualize the approach to the specific territory
- Co-construct the content of the co-imagination platform, ensuring it reflects local priorities and visual language
- Introduce the digital tools and the participatory sequence
- Begin activating a mindset shift toward recognizing citizen expertise
Co-imaginaiton in Public Space: Encountering Citizens Where They Are
Once contextual preparation is complete, mediators deploy the co-imagination platform through tablets in public space—parks, squares, transit points, community centers—approaching citizens without prior notice or formal registration. The platform operates through visual collage. Citizens compose their urban imaginaries using:
- Global commons database: Drawn from years of usage across Europe, Asia, and Africa by the Unlimited Cities network. This offers a visual language of possibilities that transcends geographic and cultural boundaries.
- Local context database: Populated during contributory workshops with territory-specific elements, ensuring the platform emerges from and reflects local knowledge and priorities.
- Innovation marketplace database: Enterprises engaged in urban transition present their solutions—intelligent lighting, distributed solar systems, innovative waste management, mobility innovations, creating dialogue around technological and infrastructural possibilities.
Citizens select, combine, and modify these elements through collage, then add brief comments explaining their choices. This tool is notably accessible—no complex language, no voting pressure, no pre-registration. The mediators assist those less comfortable with digital interfaces.
Citizens are approached in their ordinary spaces, engaged through invitation rather than formal convocation. This generates expressions that are more authentic, more embodied, and drawn from lived experience rather than abstract reasoning about urban futures. Hundreds of contributions accumulate, forming a rich, qualitative dataset of local aspirations, forming a rich, qualitative dataset structured by the platform but not
constrained by predetermined topics.
Trust Markers from Open Source Culture
- Documented and transparent intentions shared publicly
- Clear governance and decision-making protocols
- Freedom in subject matter; no predetermined conclusions
- Real-time transparency about processes and data handling
- Raw data shared in full
- External actors invited to structure and analyze the data independently
Phase 1 Outcome
Hundreds of authentic, qualitative contributions are collected. More significantly, initial participants experience tangible evidence that their input matters—they are informed about the next phases, they know that their collages will be documented, presented, and analyzed at an upcoming event and used to inform a vote. They become partners interested in the subsequent phases of the project.
Phase 2: Professional Integration and Vote-Consultation
What This Phase Does
This phase connects the local, small-scale imagination from Phase 1 to the strategic, large-scale planning required for urban transition. It operates at the scale of city strategy.
Data Structuration: From Collection to Material for Analysis
The raw collages and comments from Phase 1 are now systematically analyzed. The co-imagination platform provides preliminary data structuring through automated categorization and tagging based on the visual objects employed. Comments are analyzed thematically. This process is supported by professionals—urbanists, sociologists, data analysts—working in collaboration with city departments.
The result is not merely accumulated ideas but structured, rich material. This material is now available for professionals to work with thoughtfully. The hundreds of qualitative expressions become legible as patterns, themes, priorities, tensions, opportunities.
The Tree of Variations: Professional Response to Collective Intelligence
Professionals in the urban planning department, supported by external experts and informed by Phase 1 data, now undertake to "incarnate" the city's global transition strategy. This strategy typically addresses a 10 to 20-year planning horizon and encompasses environmental, social, and economic challenges.
Rather than presenting a single linear plan, the method proposes transforming the strategy into 3 future futures possibles issus d'une arborescence of thematics variations.
- Green space distribution: Concentrated large parks (intensive) vs. dispersed vegetatio throughout the fabric (pervasive)
- Economic and cultural life: Different spatial arrangements of commercial, cultural, and social activities
- Mobility architecture: Centralized transit hubs (traditional model) vs. distributed active mobility networks (dispersed model), or hybrid
- Housing and density: Various distributions of mixed-use development across the territory
- Art urbain et espaces artistiques: investir sur des lieux particuliers, ou partout, sur des oeuvres pérennes ou éphémère ?
From Variations to (3) possible futures
Each possible futures is constructed by synthesizing, combining, and adapting the hundreds of ideas from Phase 1 into coherent strategic frameworks. This is not choosing among citizen ideas or dismissing them as impractical. Rather, professionals examine: How do these ideas, when listened to carefully, illuminate the complex realities strategies must address? Ideas that may have seemed contradictory locally are examined for how they might cohere at city scale. Ideas expressed for one neighborhood are considered for applicability elsewhere. Temporal dimensions are examined: some ideas serve immediate needs, others longer-term visions.
The tree of variations and the possible futures emerges from this professional-citizen dialogue—not as professional imposition, but as professional response to collective intelligence.
Vote-Consultation: éclairer les décisions sur la grande échelle
Participants are now invited to engage with the variations through a vote-consultation process. Critically, this is not conventional voting where citizens select option A, B, or C and the majority choice becomes binding.
Instead, the process unfolds in this sequence:
- Participants review the three possible futures and identify which resonates most with their values and priorities
- They examine each thematic variation of their preferred variation (mobility, green space, housing, cultural life
- They are invited to propose improvements—could elements from other variations strengthen this choice? Are there specific modifications?
- They explain their reasoning
The Synthesis
The final strategic framework adopted by the city is not one of the original three variations. It is a new synthesis, enriched by thousands of participants' feedback, refinements, and priorities.
Participants understand not only that their input was heard, but specifically where it shaped outcomes.They understand the reasoning behind decisions that differed from their proposals. They see themselves as co-authors of the city's direction.
Phase 2 Outcome
Participation scales from hundreds (Phase 1) to thousands (Phase 2). The city's transition strategy reflects both professional expertise and distributed citizen intelligence. Participants observe concrete evidence that larger-scale decisions integrate their contributions. Trust strengthens on evidence, not declaration.