Creative workshops for systemic risk literacy: An open pedagogical methodology for dissemination
Jonathan Millie


Urban sustainability initiatives increasingly recognise the need to address systemic risks such
as climate disruption, resource dependencies, ecological degradation, and social
fragmentation. However, these risks are still largely approached through technical indicators
and expert-driven frameworks that remain weakly connected to lived experience, territorial
knowledge, and cultural practices. Moreover, the question is no longer whether there is a
problem with climate change, but how to respond to it and how to develop collective capacity
for action in the face of these challenges. As a result, dissemination processes and the
recommendations that emerge from them often struggle to resonate with practitioners, artists,
and citizens, limiting their capacity to support meaningful and lasting transformation.
CIRCUL’ARTs provides an opportunity to rethink dissemination as a shared learning process,
grounded in diverse forms of knowledge and critical pedagogies. This proposal contributes
to Working Group 6 by exploring how creative, locally grounded workshops can support
systemic risk literacy and the co-production of context-sensitive insights, while drawing on
principles of plural schooling and inclusive learning developed across the Action.
The project proposes the joint development of a workshop-based pedagogical approach,
grounded in case studies of creative and circular practices developed in both European and
non-European contexts. A first stepping stone of this approach has been carried out through
the documentary project Into the Rewild, developed in Patagonia (Latin America), which
explored how rewilding practices, territorial narratives, and ancestral relationships to land and
resources can support collective sense-making around systemic change. Building on this
experience, the workshops bring together systems thinking, artistic practice, and local
exploration. Rather than passing on predefined knowledge, they function as spaces of shared
exploration in which researchers, artists, practitioners, and citizens examine how systemic
risks, resilience, and regeneration are experienced in their own contexts. Through activities
such as place-based observation, collective storytelling, and creative mapping, artistic
practices; visual, narrative, performative or material are mobilised as methods of knowledge
production, enabling participants to understand interdependencies, feedback loops, and
trade-offs that are often difficult to grasp through conventional analytical approaches.
Methodologically, the workshops are organised around three flexible stages: (i) engaging with
a place through observation and storytelling; (ii) translating insights into shared creative forms;
and (iii) developing locally grounded, provisional recommendations based on what
participants consider meaningful and feasible. The design of these stages is informed by
insights from neuroscience, helping to create learning environments that integrate diverse
perspectives and value systems, and that maximise pluralism and collective engagement. The
proposed methodology is conceived as an open pedagogical “recipe” that artists and
facilitators can adapt and reuse across different territorial and cultural contexts. By prioritising
learning processes over predefined outputs, this contribution offers Working Group 6 a
replicable dissemination framework.