Design for Urban Change Toolkit
A hands-on tool for navigating complexity, building collaborations, and designing inclusive interventions in urban spaces.
What is it?
The Design for Urban Change Toolkit is a workshop tool to support teams, communities, and organizations in imagining and shaping responses to urban challenges. Rooted in a
people-first, design-driven approach offers a flexible process for exploring local contexts, generating ideas, and testing strategies for change.
This toolkit invites collaboration, reflection, and experimentation.
Whether you’re activating a public space, addressing a neighborhood issue, or building a new initiative, the toolkit can help you frame challenges, map relationships, imagine outcomes, and take action with care.
The Design for Urban Change Toolkit is a workshop-based resource created to help teams, communities, and organizations explore challenges and design strategies for meaningful change in cities.
Developed through years of experience in public space work across Sweden, Lebanon, and Turkey, the toolkit guides users through a flexible, people-first process rooted in creativity, collaboration, and systems thinking.
It is ideal for:
Civic and cultural organizations
Municipal teams
Urban activists and designers
Community-led initiatives
Cross-sector partnerships
What’s inside?
The toolkit includes a growing set of cards and canvases, each designed to support different parts of your journey—from framing the challenge to testing ideas and building lasting relationships.
Toolkit components:
5 Process Cards (Inquire, Imagine, Gather, Pilot, Share)
Prompt Cards to situate your challenge, define your context, and imagine outcomes
Strategic Approach Cards (The Campaigner, Knowledge Producer, Interventionist, Cultural Programmer)
Methods Cards with research and intervention tactics
Relationship Cards to map types of collaboration (communication, consultation, co-creation, etc.)
Theory & Concepts Cards for deeper reflection and framing
2 Canvases: Challenge & Methods Canvas + Stakeholder/Systems Canvas
The toolkit is still in a prototype phase, so it is currently available through facilitated workshops or by request.
How to Work With Us
Book a Workshop
We offer custom-designed workshops using the toolkit for municipalities, cultural orgs, and community-led projects. Sessions can be adapted to your context and goals—whether you’re launching a new initiative or rethinking an existing program.
Order a Toolkit (Pilot Use)
Interested in using the toolkit in your own process? We are selectively offering the current prototype version to collaborators willing to give feedback and share learnings.