2023 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"

Urban Lab, the Urban Innovation and Transformation Laboratory, is a participatory planning experience that began to be implemented in May 2022 in the city of Santa Fe, Argentina. It arose as an initiative after detecting that the city did not have a space for participation and collaboration that integrates all the innovative capital that the city possesses and that promotes the creation of a public ecosystem of open innovation, based on participation, collaboration and articulation between key sectors of the city.

For this reason, its main objectives include helping to identify and solve current urban challenges; and build the challenges of Santa Fe Capital for the coming years as well as promote spaces for participation and co-creation together with the scientific-technological, academic, productive, entrepreneurial and social community to think of innovative solutions to the main urban challenges of the city .

In this context, the launch of the Pact for the Future of Santa Fe stands out among its most recent and resonant activities, a collective agreement to build a fair, equitable, productive and sustainable Santa Fe Capital, which involves the entire community from a set of commitments and shared strategies. This initiative is part of the Pact for the Future of United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) and of which the city is the first in Latin America to adhere to and launch its territorialization process, with more than 120 participants representing different fields and sectors, in the first activities.

Urban Lab is a space where the city thinks of itself, creates and projects new futures. It is an area of meeting and exchange between the State and society, in which public, private and civil society capacities are strengthened to generate ideas, processes, solutions and projects that transform Santa Fe. It projects its objectives on a double horizon : in the short term, it is proposed to address concrete and immediate problems; and in the long term, think about the challenges of the next 50 years for the city.

In a year of work Urban LAb has generated:

• 3 Ideation and Prototyping Labs.
• 500 participants from 43 different organizations.
• 35 exploratory interviews.
• 201 ideas registered.
• 15 selected ideas.
• 7 ongoing projects with 25 agencies actively participating.
• Pact for the future released

Towards the future, the Laboratory intends to continue generating initiatives and proposals to contribute to making Santa Fe a smarter city, where sustainability is a shared value; a livable and people-centered city, but at the same time competitive, that retains its human capital and summons talented and creative people, that attracts investment and generates quality jobs.

https://santafeciudad.gov.ar/urbanlab/ (External link)