Ditte Lysgaard Vind: A love affair between placemaking and co-responsibility

When placemaking becomes the arena and co-responsibility the structure, cities gain the capacity to solve problems at scale.

The transformation of cities is often told through buildings. New housing districts, new infrastructure and new public spaces. But beneath the physical transformation lies something more fundamental: the structures through which responsibility is shared.

The story of Copenhagen is not only a story about planning and architecture. It is a reminder that systemic urban change becomes possible when we build structures for collaboration. If we dare to be ambitious, create frameworks that allow actors to work together and organise collaboration rather than hoping it will happen, urban transformation can happen within a generation.

Because no actor can build a city alone, cities are collective systems in which public institutions, private capital, academia, and citizens all play a part in the solution. What ultimately matters is whether these actors operate in isolation or through structures that allow their capabilities to reinforce each other.

This is where the concept of co-responsibility becomes useful. Co-responsibility means acknowledging that responsibility for societal challenges is shared and that we need all hands on deck to succeed. Instead of assigning responsibility to a single actor, responsibility is organised among actors who each contribute from their respective positions. But co-responsibility only becomes real when it has somewhere to live.

This is where placemaking enters the picture. Placemaking creates the physical arena in which co-responsibility can operate. A neighbourhood, a housing development or a piece of urban infrastructure forces actors to translate ambitions into decisions about financing, governance and delivery. Placemaking thrives through co-responsibility, while the physical reality of place turns co-responsibility into a tangible tool for transformation rather than an abstract vision.

What makes this relationship particularly powerful is that it allows cities to pursue several forms of value simultaneously: environmental value through climate mitigation, adaptation and responsible use of resources; social value through affordability, physical and mental health and stronger social cohesion; and economic value through competitiveness and innovation.

The critical point, however, is that economic development is not the goal in itself. It is a tool. Urban transformation requires innovation and investment, but these become meaningful only when directed toward solving societal challenges. This is where place-based co-responsibility becomes decisive.

By structuring collaboration around concrete places and projects, cities create the conditions where economic activity, investment and innovation can contribute directly to societal goals. The scale of urban challenges means that multiple incentives can align within the same solution. Private actors can generate returns while contributing to societal outcomes, while public institutions can pursue societal goals while enabling investment and innovation. Place-based co-responsibility therefore, becomes the practical mechanism through which environmental, social and economic value can be delivered simultaneously.

Housing illustrates why this matters. In most cities, around 70% of capital in the built environment is private, while a large share of housing demand is for affordable or social housing. Markets alone cannot deliver this, but public finance alone cannot deliver it either. The challenge is therefore structural, because multiple societal goals must be addressed within the same system.

Affordability, climate adaptation, urban cohesion and economic development converge in the same neighbourhoods and housing projects. Placemaking is where these challenges meet, while co-responsibility is the structure that organises actors to address them.

For this to work, however, the structure of collaboration matters. Transparency and stability through institutional structures create the trust required for collaboration. Trust allows cities to orchestrate different actors and bring forward the best capabilities at the right moment, while maintaining the agility needed to adapt when conditions change.

Several cities are experimenting with how such structures can function in practice.

The lesson is that cities are experimenting with new structures of shared responsibility.

Too often, innovation in the built environment remains trapped in individual developments. Each project is treated as unique, so solutions are demonstrated once and rarely repeated. This is the uniqueness trap. The actors that succeed instead work with a portfolio logic, allowing knowledge, expertise and partnerships to move from one project to the next.

Yet building the trust required for such collaboration is not trivial. Public institutions have often been shaped by decades of risk aversion, in which mistakes are punished, and incentives for experimentation are limited. At the same time, many public institutions struggle with capability gaps as the complexity of urban challenges increases. Short political cycles reinforce short-term decision-making, while strong incumbent interests and lobbying often reinforce existing path dependencies.

These structural conditions make collaboration difficult even when the intention is present. This is precisely why institutional structures matter. When transparency, stability and clear governance frameworks are in place, collaboration becomes possible despite these constraints. Private actors can engage with confidence, public authorities can maintain legitimacy, and knowledge can accumulate across projects rather than being lost after each development.

Seen in this light, place-based co-responsibility is not simply a governance idea. It is the practical tool that allows cities to align actors, capital and knowledge around shared outcomes.

Cities will increasingly be required to deliver environmental resilience, social cohesion and economic competitiveness simultaneously. No single institution can deliver this alone. Place-based co-responsibility provides the structure through which this collective capacity can emerge.

Placemaking creates the arena where societal challenges become concrete, while co-responsibility organises the actors capable of addressing them. Together, they allow cities to deliver both scale and societal value.

These reflections emerged from my preparation for and participation at MIPIM in Cannes, and from the wider conversation about how cities organise collaboration across public and private actors.