Climate adapted people shelters : a transdisciplinary reimagining of public infrastructure through open, design-led innovation

Contemporary approaches to planning of services and infrastructure for urban communities call for practices that embed stakeholder knowledge to ensure urban resilience and sustainability (Eakin et al. 2017; Reddel and Woolcock 2004). Accordingly, governments have begun to embrace the concepts of co-design and co-production as central tenets of a new paradigm of citizen engagement (McKinlay 2013). This type of deep engagement has so far primarily been employed in larger-scale urban developments (e.g. precinct-scale renewal, city-wide energy or transport systems) (Glackin and Dionisio 2016) because they fundamentally alter urban environments and city liveability (Calhoun 2016; Newton 2012; Thomson and Newman 2016). The contribution of community interactions with small-scale infrastructure to the success of major urban systems is often overlooked, but is critical to place-making and enhanced liveability (Adhitya and Tyler 2016). At this scale, a transdisciplinary (TD) approach and involvement of the users of infrastructure in its design are desirable to ensure the infrastructure meets community needs (Manzini and Rizzo 2011).