MANTRA is a transdisciplinary project that deploys creative, participatory, citizen science methods to investigate specific health risks and opportunities in rural areas paying attention to physical and social dimensions of climate change and adaptation. Together with a village-based citizen initiative in the South of the Netherlands MANTRA researchers co-organized five living lab meetings and interviewed 20 citizens who participated in the lab meetings, twice individually with an arts-based utopian method to co-create a shared future healthy environment.
This contribution describes how the deployment of an arts-based utopian method in interviews and living lab meetings helped to scale down the societal problem of climate change and enabled citizens who participated in the living labs, to discover common ground, formulate actionable goals and develop prototypes such as a self-sufficient biological garden.