This deliverable outlines the first steps in setting up and engaging the GreenInCities Community of Practice (CoP). The CoP is designed to serve as a central knowledge-sharing tool that nurtures collaboration, builds competencies, and facilitates active knowledge exchange among practitioners, researchers, and local stakeholders across geographic and disciplinary boundaries.

Rather than acting as an isolated task, the CoP weaves its way throughout the project lifecycle to connect R&D teams, municipal planners, and local citizens. This document functions as an operational handbook for facilitators and leaders within the CoP to create, maintain, and scale up local and international practicing communities—aligning co-creation methods and peer-learning opportunities to support on-the-ground greening interventions.

Primary Audience:

• City Teams and Pilot Coordinators

• GreenInCities Consortium Technical and R&D Partners

Secondary Audience:

• EU Agencies and Granting Authorities (CINEA)

• External Practitioners, Policy-makers, and Urban Designers

The setup of the GreenInCities CoP and this deliverable followed a rigorous, collaborative development process:

• Methodological foundation review: A deep-dive review of the European Commission JRC Communities of Practice Playbook and Wenger's CoP Guidebook to establish best practices in CoP structure, governance, and engagement.

• Cross-WP guidance integration: Synthesizing the qualitative Living Lab methods from D3.1 and D3.3 and public space requirements from D2.1, D2.2, D2.4 to anchor the CoP's technical backbone.

• Twinning & co-creation setup: Structuring multi-level collaboration frameworks to facilitate knowledge loops between the 5 Leader Cities and 6 Follower Cities.

• Baseline diagnostic surveys: Developing and distributing a comprehensive diagnostic questionnaire to city teams to map local capacity, trust, and learning needs.

The Community of Practice setup establishes a dynamic, multi-platform, and multi-layered governance model to support inter-city learning and knowledge exchange through several key operational components:

• The structural framework of the CoP is organized around three foundational Wengerian dimensions: a shared area of interest (the Domain of inclusive co-creation), a network of active participants (the Community of experts, citizens, and non-humans), and a shared repository of resources (the Practice of utilizing NbS tools).

• A multi-tiered governance structure separates interactions into three distinct layers, starting with the R&D layer of technical partners, transitioning to the Twinning layer of inter-city learning, and grounding in the Local layer of municipal Living Labs.

• An online "Living Annex" is established as a continuously updated repository on external platforms (like Miro, Google Drive, and the website) to host evolving tool-application examples and guidelines for practitioners.

• The framework deploys a hybrid communication protocol that couples structured monthly technical and bi-monthly meetings with multi-platform tools (such as Slack, Miro, and WhatsApp) to sustain engagement.

• An empirical monitoring toolkit integrates Usoro's interaction quality metrics and JRC Playbook criteria to continuously evaluate community vitality, trust, and knowledge exchange quality.

The practical deployment of this multi-layered CoP is designed to drive systemic, long-term enhancements in urban sustainability and cooperative knowledge transfer:

• The historically slow process of inter-city replication is transformed into a strategic, active learning loop where Follower Cities can rapidly adapt co-creation methods and digital tools directly from their Leader counterparts.

• Cross-organizational "Practice Groups" are formally established to collaboratively iterate on specific solution categories, bridging the gap between scientific R&D and on-the-ground municipal execution.

• Diverse human voices and non-human stakeholders are meaningfully integrated into urban governance, ensuring that social equity, inclusivity, and biodiversity-led design are preserved across all scales.

• Knowledge assets are secured for long-term sustainability, creating a robust, out-scalable platform that continues to inspire and guide European cities outside the consortium beyond the project's lifetime.

• Figure 4: Mapped Layers of the Overarching CoP

• Figure 1: Project Phases of Co-Creation

• Table 4 : Solutions Categories and Initial Providers

• Table 5: Cities and their Technical Partners