The Junglathon research and co-design path represent a fundamental element of the Prato Urban Jungle project, dedicated to the participation and involvement of citizens. Through an innovative approach based on design thinking processes, Junglathons aims to involve citizens of the three areas of intervention - ESTRA headquarters, Turchia str. and Metropolitan Market in Giordano str. - and is aimed at raising awareness and citizen participation, civic imagination and co-design of sustainable urban futures.

A process of social and cultural innovation with a focus on the theme of forestry, urban green and related ecosystem services. The idea behind the Junglathon is that urban forests represent an extension of urban green, growing on one side vertically towards the sky and along the walls of buildings and on the other horizontally in the surrounding social fabric, through relational mechanisms and projects triggered by research, co-design, training and participation pathways.

The entire process of involvement and co-design focuses on the value of the multiple ecosystem services produced by trees and urban green, to name a few: air purification, water drainage and the mitigation of heat waves, promotion of public health, encouragement of social interactions. In fact, during the activities, the goal is not to stop and collect the feedbacks and impressions of those who are carriers of unmet social needs, but to make them responsible and activate them (Manzini, 2018) to conceive and create future scenarios through collaborative design. In this way the project autonomy of the participants, understood as the ability to take care of emerging projects and to generate new relational and socio-economic forms, is stimulated.

The Junglathon pathway consists of the implementation of 3 co-design cycles, one for each intervention area of the urban jungle, consisting of the following phases:

1. RESEARCH AND INVOLVEMENT PHASE with the aim of bringing out the needs and expectations of citizens, directing subsequent activities and involving all stakeholders.

2. CO-DESIGN WORKSHOP: organization and facilitation of Junglathons, an intensive co-design format with the aim of developing innovative concepts with respect to the challenge proposed by the Prato Urban Jungle project and better defined in the previous research and involvement phase. This phase has a double objective: to make the participants experience a creative and collaborative process in order to involve them in the implementation of the activities and increase the sense of responsibility and belonging to the design results to which they have contributed.

3. TESTING AND DEFINITION, with the aim of validating and fine-tuning the concepts emerged from the Junglathons. This phase represents a further moment of involvement of and approach to citizenship where feedback and impressions are collected on what they or their fellow citizens, have contributed to design.