Collection

Transformation Themes

Transforming places into irresistible circular societies is an ambitious and difficult process. The Desire Transformation guide will take you through 6 transformation themes providing concrete advice, considerations, and applicable tools for a participatory, multi-level, and multi-disciplinary transformation process.
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Desire Transformation guide
The six transformation themes are a supplement to support the application of the Desire Principles.

Transforming places into irresistible circular societies is an ambitious and difficult process.

The Desire Transformation guide will take you through 6 transformation themes providing concrete advice, considerations, and applicable tools for a participatory, multi-level, and multi-disciplinary transformation process.

The 6 themes represent the accumulated insights, observations, and reflections from experiments conducted over two years across eight sites in five European countries supported by knowledge institutions and innovation experts.

How they work

The transformation themes are a supplement to support the application of the Desire Principles. The themes are interdependent and are not presented in any particular order. In other words, they are not positioned as steps in a process you need to follow one by one, they are there to support you right from the start and when you see fit. The themes and especially the advice are all interrelated, meaning they overlap, stating that the lessons learned and thus the advice support each other. This collection of advice aims to offer learnings and support actions around the common themes we have identified and, we hope, enable a few shortcuts - or at least a smoother process.

Who can benefit from these insights?

The Desire Transformation themes are intended to support various actors in the built environment - and beyond. In other words, these insights and lessons learned are intended for people and organisations that want to take a leading role in pushing for circularity in the process of transforming spaces and places in their country, region, or city - in an irresistible manner. It targets the enlightened group of leaders - Irresistible City Makers - who are seeking new and ambitious approaches to transformation and influence more radical change, faster.

Materials in this collection (6)

Transformation Theme

Build and Maintain Trust

A key element of facilitating a transformation process most fruitfully and progressively is trust. Trust between and among actors, trust from and to political stakeholders and citizens, as well as trust in the process.
Transformation Theme

Establish and Nurture Ownership

When working with long time horizons in (often complex) projects it is important to maintain momentum and engagement among the involved actors in order to foster agency and ownership.
When engaging in a transformation process, regardless of your point of departure, you need to evoke empathy and care for people, places, organisations, and all species.
Transformation Theme

Raise and Sustain Ambitions

BTC City - Hackathon February 2024. Credit: BTC d.d.
When working with long-term transformation, reaching the visions and ambitions requires enabling and sustaining inspiration and motivation among actors.
Transformation Theme

Embrace and Enable Inclusion

Ensuring diverse representation and inclusion of actors, different societal layers, and species is the essence of transforming places.
Transformation Theme

Monitor and Learn Continuously

Ensuring facilitation, documentation, and visualisation of learnings throughout all phases of a project is a crucial element in long-term transformations.