Co-creating climate-resilient cities: a multi-method participatory approach for future scenario building and prioritization

Abstract

While global frameworks such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) call for participatory planning processes that embed local priorities into future-oriented climate action, mainstream urban planning and governance approaches often remain rigid and disconnected from local concerns, leading to a critical vision-to-decision gap. This study introduces and tests a multi-method participatory foresight framework for developing locally grounded climate-resilient urban futures, bridging the gap between community-led visioning and formal administrative prioritization. The framework was deployed in two diverse European Living Labs, the Mediterranean island of Chios, Greece, and the Baltic capital of Vilnius, Lithuania, to navigate different socio-ecological contexts. Our approach integrates: (a) co-creative scenario building for long-term (2050) urban futures; (b) quantitative prioritization via the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to weight stakeholder-defined criteria; and (c) expert-led feedback loops to refine technical feasibility. The results demonstrate that the framework successfully translates qualitative community narratives into structured, weighted data suitable for formal planning cycles. By operationalizing the transition from co-creation to prioritized climate-resilient development pathways, this research provides a model for anticipatory governance, ensuring that long-term climate strategies are both technically robust and democratically legitimate.