The growth of cities is set to pose one of the biggest challenges in sustainable development over the coming decades. Whilst basic physical infrastructure and services need improvement to accommodate the influx of new people, cities are nothing without their citizens. The social cost of urbanisation can be enormous, with mental health and suicide all considerably higher in urban contexts. Design interventions should therefore encourage social benefits that promote safe, resilient cities with improved wellbeing for citizens.

This chapter outlines Our Future Foyle, an action research project in Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Through design research a number of co-designed interventions have been created for a safe, resilient and inclusive city space responding to the mental health challenge along the city’s river whilst addressing Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11. Through an inclusive process of community engagement and design, three key design interventions are outlined: innovative sensory installations along the riverfront, the largest proposed art installation in the country and a series of portable pop-up spaces for community and cultural uses.

The project has shown that inclusive design can be a useful method for involving the entire community in identifying key challenges and priorities and developing innovative context-specific solutions that address key targets of SDG11, amongst others. However, there remain challenges as designs move from concepts to governance and policy levels.