Clean City Linköping: Co-designing innovative solutions with young people

Change management

At an early stage of the project design a young person in the target group aged 16 to 22 was engaged as a co-worker to provide insights into the situation of young people and to help the project team of Linköping City understand ways of thinking, talking and behaving which were common amongst different groups of young people. The team consisted of a youth liaison officer and an external consultant who jointly with the young person designed the strategy of the Clean City project.

The innovative idea the team came up with was to offer young people a very well-paid job during one summer month to drive behaviour change among them.  The job involved not just cleaning the streets in the city centre but also, for about 50 percent of the working time, producing a daily blog with photos and film clips illustrating what it looks like in the city centre and what young people could do to improve the quality of the public spaces.

The Clean City Project was launched in summer 2009 when the City of Linköping advertised these new jobs in a press advert on four different dates, announcing the intention  to employ four young people in total. The recruitment and selection process were highly innovative: Candidates had to introduce themselves on a public website with citizens assessing the suitability of the candidate and voting for their preferred candidate. This meant that the Clean City vision had already been widely discussed in public before the young people took up their job as city cleaners.

In order to qualify as a candidate young people not only have to provide a CV but also take part in an interview with the project team and other representatives of the local authority and answer a number of questions related to bin collections, recycling and street cleaning. The local authority provided every candidate with an information package, so that they could get up to speed on these issues. Furthermore, the candidates were encouraged to present their own ideas on how to perform their job. After a pre-selection process by the local authority, information on the shortlisted candidates was published on the website of the City of Linköping for a week, so that the local community could have a vote on who they thought werethe most qualified candidates.

The project was coordinated by a youth liaison officer who also made sure that the website was kept up-to-date and appealed to the young target group. During the summer months the website grew considerably as young people input their blogs, experiences and other information.

After the success in its first year, Clean City continued to be marketed through word of mouth and the website www.renstad.nu ( Swedish). This in turn led to innovative ideas such as the creation of ‘talking’ bins which started talking in different languages when people approached them, asking people to throw their rubbish into the bin.

Linköping City has moved on to work with schools and pre-school children. For example, a local secondary school produced a commercial which was shown on cinema screens in Linköping.