Anna Palla

The 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child emphasises the value of listening to young people’s voices. Since its inception, there have been significant moves to involve young people in research that concerns their lives in a time of environmental emergency. Drawing on critical analysis of our work with Youth Action Partnerships (YAPs), this article explores how co‐production with young people can effectively be achieved and offers meaningful ways for young people to share their stories in a time of climate crisis. We draw on rich insights from our experience of working in partnership with young people and explore how they have been supported to shape and influence the research process. Our findings enable us to build on Hickey’s five principles for co‐production with adults in a health and social care context. We show that, in addition to those, there is need to consider three other principles when co‐working with youth. We embed the eight principles for co‐production in a new model for effective co‐production with young people to support researchers to successfully prepare for, and implement, such co‐production processes in other work.

Urban resilience must consider the ability of cities to cope with the effects of climate change. Community awareness raising and sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDs) are often mentioned in the literature as effective adaptation actions while the success of these solutions is highly context-dependent and improved planning procedures are urgently needed. In this framework, the URCA! project represents a good practice aiming to strengthen the resilience of urban areas by promoting the implementation of SUDs in territorial planning. The main objective of the present research deals with the role of participation in promoting the use of SUDs and their uptake in town planning and land management involving local communities, students, experts, local authorities, and enterprises. To this end, the research adopts a participatory approach to SUDs urban planning for three case studies in Italy selected under the criterion of maximum variation (Brescia, Genoa, and Matera). For the three case studies, participatory approaches are at different stages of development thus requiring appropriate ways of interacting and resulting in different impacts on decisions. Preliminary results, drivers, and barriers in the application of the participatory approach are discussed and compared in order to bring innovation into planning practices, stimulating a revision of typical governance mechanisms.

Planning for resilient cities requires an evidence-based understanding of flood risk and the involvement of stakeholders and local actors. The paper addresses research developed within the URCA!—Urban Resilience to Climate Change: to activate the participatory mapping and decision support tool for enhancing sustainable urban drainage—project. A top-down/bottom-up participatory and flexible methodology for the conception of participatory mapping aimed at the planning and installation of sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS) on the territory is then developed. The innovative methodology is applied and tested in the case study of the Sampierdarena district in Genoa, northern Italy. This research paper illustrates the development of a participatory map (Pmap) that can support the implementation of SUDS as mitigation/adaptation strategies, integrating technical assessment and containing community visions and expectations. Findings concerning the connections between proposed SUDS locations and their frequencies confirm the relevance of the commercial area and the main traffic lanes along, confirming that all zones characterized by intense vehicular and pedestrian flow are suitable for SUDS as a solution to contribute to urban flood resilience. The georeferenced and intergenerational Pmap may be integrated into a decision support system to be developed as a guidance tool for the public administration.