A Systematic Assessment for the Co-Design of Green Infrastructure Prototypes—A Case Study in Urban Costa Rica
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript is well written and organized, and comprehensive. The work is relevant to the journal's scops and has a clear scientific motivation. The references are up-to-date and the results and discussion sections are concise and thorough. In general, the work is scientifically sound. Therefore, I recommend publication of this manuscript.
Minor points:
(1) The introduction part is too long; it should be reduced.
(2) The aim of the work should more clarify in the introduction part.
(3) Resolution of Figs. 1 and 2 needs to be improved.
(4) I recommended that data in table 4 presents as text form not table form.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you very much for your revision and recommendations. In the following paragraphs you find our corrections and answers to them. To improve the language and style we will make use of a language editing service, we hope it will be available for you during the second review round.
Kind regards,
The authors
Point 1: The introduction part is too long; it should be reduced.
Response 1: The introduction section has been reduced to a more summarized version, especially in the first paragraphs until line 89.
Point 2: The aim of the work should more clarify in the introduction part.
Response 2: The goals of the study are described in detail in the second paragraph on page 3 of the manuscript. To highlight the aim and scientific contribution of the study the following text has been included in line 116 “In this context, this study aims to propose a general guidance to systematically assess abductive co-design strategies of innovative infrastructure in urban systems, especially those highly governed by normative procedures in relation to water management and retrofitting of urban landscapes.”
Point 3: Resolution of Figs. 1 and 2 needs to be improved.
Response 3: Fig1 has been improved in line 275 and Fig.2 in Line 447. The major change in the figures has been the increasing of the font size and the reconfiguration of the text in the image shape.
Point 4: I recommended that data in table 4 presents as text form not table form.
Response 4: Thank you for the recommendation, as we discussed how to introduce the results we propose to present the table in this format instead of only text because it facilitates the comprehension of the design procedure as a whole. It also supports understanding how the different activities of our field work are associated with the general procedure proposed in Table 1; thereby allowing a simple comparison of the general framework proposed initially and its application to the case study.
Reviewer 2 Report
1. Manuscript discusses systematic assessment for co-design of green infrastructure prototype, but its results outcome in terms of quantitative aspect is not so some clear. If authors have scientific data collected from Costa Rica, it should be presented.
2. Do authors has studied on GI prototype efficiencies. It should be in the manuscript. Or, the prototype is only on planning stage.
3. Do Conceptual phases and research activities of results are only been at theoretical scale. If yes, all the research activities mentioned in the manuscript is already in various literatures, what’s new about these concepts?
4. What Table 4 is relevant in the results section?
5. The present manuscript seems more like a view on a topic and no data and its associated results for GI has been mentioned Costa Rica.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for your revision. In the following paragraphs you find our corrections and answers to your suggestions. We would like to highlight that this article does not cover analysis of quantitative data but deals with the process of co-designing itself by applying a systematic qualitative analysis. We have revised the manuscript and agree that it can be more specific in this aspect, as you will read in our answers in the next points and find related changes in the manuscript. Regarding the English language and style, we will make use of a Language Editing Service, and we hope you can see the changes during the course of the second round.
Kind regards,
The authors
Point 1: Manuscript discusses systematic assessment for co-design of green infrastructure prototype, but its results outcome in terms of quantitative aspect is not so some clear. If authors have scientific data collected from Costa Rica, it should be presented.
Response 1: The process of co-designing green infrastructure itself is our scope in this article. As explained in section 2.1 “Case study: origin, background, and key insights” -line 164, after introducing a general context, we explained that a long-term operation was not possible for the reasons we later evaluate. Consequently, monitoring of the performance efficiency in a quantitative way was initially expected but not feasible. With this article we aim to systematically discuss the qualitative aspects influencing the decision-making trajectories; including participation levels of stakeholders and drivers influencing the procedures, aiming to present our field experience in a systematic way as a resource that can guide similar experiences but in different contexts. We have introduced a text in line 166 “It also impeded monitoring of the performance of the resulting system in a quantitative way, as initially intended.” to highlight this issue. In addition, we have highlighted in the abstract (line 12) that the article presents the assessment of the ”process” of co-design
Results from other academic studies within our research group that deal with quantitative aspects (e.g. 10.3390/su13010384 about urban space distribution; 10.1016/j.uclim.2021.100961 about water and energy flows; 10.1007/s13280-020-01493-8 and 10.3390/land9090339 about hydrological modeling at different spatial scales) will allow us to integrate those aspects in the discussion of the potential and challenges to realistically implement our designs in the urban domain.
Point 2: Do authors has studied on GI prototype efficiencies. It should be in the manuscript. Or, the prototype is only on planning stage.
Response 2: Please refer to the answer in the previous point. Although we manage to cross the planning stage until the implementation, our scope lies on the dynamics and relations we found in the case study as a system that tends to follow dominant trajectories. The planning stage is a partial result presented in our study and can be related until phase 5 of the proposed conceptual framework (see Table 1, Table 4, Fig 2). The outcomes from the implementation called our attention to the process we followed and motivated us to go deeper into the analysis of the qualitative aspects that control our process.
Point 3: Do Conceptual phases and research activities of results are only been at theoretical scale. If yes, all the research activities mentioned in the manuscript is already in various literatures, what’s new about these concepts?
Response 3: Conceptual phases have been proposed as an integration of knowledge from different fields. Design principles proposed by references 28, 29, 42 were merged with processes existing in the transdisciplinary field (e.g. ref 35 for “phase 0”), and dimensions of participation and power present when stakeholders are included in the design (ref: 43, 44). Those theoretical approaches were adapted in the framework we proposed (e.g. Fig1, Table4) as a resource to guide the evaluation of early experiences promoting nature. By doing so, we present a conceptual framework and apply it to our real-world experience as a way to communicate the challenges and barriers we faced over specific phases.
Our conceptualization is new in relation to the integration of approaches from different academic fields (i.e. abductive design process, participation in social sciences, phase 0 from transdisciplinarity) to develop a resource that guides reflection and systematization related to urban water systems and green infrastructure. Nevertheless, the configuration of the framework allows its easy adaptation to other contexts that are not necessary dealing with our design aspects.
Point 4: What Table 4 is relevant in the results section?
Response 4: Table 4 presents the results in an organized manner to refer to the conceptual phases introduced in section 2.2.1. Table 1. We preferred to present those initial results in a table rather than only describing in text to facilitate the comprehension between theoretical phases and research activities of the case study.
Point 5: The present manuscript seems more like a view on a topic and no data and its associated results for GI has been mentioned Costa Rica.
Response 5: Please refer to the insights we provided in point 1.
Reviewer 3 Report
I believe that the author and the team behind the work have a story to tell about the participated design effort with a commentary on the participants' experience and a position about how, through such exercises, we can
develop wider awareness in the next generation of landscape architects and planners. However, this paper is not focusing on this but on the attempt to produce a generic/universal framework. The paper reads very well and provides an overall scientific impression at first glance. Nevertheless, beyond the refined form, almost new knowledge is provided. What is advanced by the paper could be said about almost all the co-design experiences. An instance of the superficial proposition of recycled knowledge, table 3 is pure plagiarism.
What is the novelty proposed by this study? What about the specificity of the subject? What about co-design as a unique, situated experience which is necessarily context-dependent?
I believe that a scientific article shall be written and proposed to a journal only when it offers a significant contribution to the academic community and enlarge the body of knowledge. This work seems to be driven by a different necessity: namely the career development of wealthy scholars that can afford the high publication costs of disreputable journals. Work like this may contribute to discrediting the whole academic community through a process of progressive devaluation of the authoritative role of scientists.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer, please see the attachment
To improve the language and style we will make use of a language editing service, we hope it will be available for you during the second review round.
Kind regards,
The authors
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 4 Report
The paper is well organized. However, there are still some grammar mistakes and some parts are hard to understand.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thanks for your remarks, certainly, we have found that in some parts of the text the ideas we want to express are difficult to read. To improve the understanding of the manuscript we have carried out an English editing and proofreading, and several lines in the text were corrected. To make your reading more easy to follow, we have cleaned the manuscript by accepting the extensive corrections made after the first review round; therefore in this latest version you will directly find our last writing improvements.
Best regards,
