Urban living labs: governing urban sustainability transitions

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Highlights

  • ULL are sites to design, test and learn from innovation in real time.

  • ULL are proliferating rapidly while our understanding of their nature and purpose is still evolving.

  • We seek to develop a new perspective on ULL by bringing governance thinking into transitions theory and vice versa.

  • This perspective helps to identify shared concepts to inform the analysis of ULL in different contexts.

  • The perspective demonstrates the roles of design, practices and processes of ULL.

Urban Living Labs (ULL) are advanced as an explicit form of intervention delivering sustainability goals for cities. Established at the boundaries between research, innovation and policy, ULL are intended to design, demonstrate and learn about the effects of urban interventions in real time. While rapidly growing as an empirical phenomenon, our understanding of the nature and purpose of ULL is still evolving. While much of the existing literature draws attention to the aims and workings of ULL, there have to date been fewer critical accounts that seek to understand their purpose and implications. In this paper, we suggest that transition studies and the literature on urban governance offer important insights that can enable us to address this gap.

Introduction

Urban Living Labs (ULL) are being advanced as an explicit form of intervention capable of delivering sustainability goals for cities. ULL can be broadly conceived as forums ‘for innovation, applied to the development of new products, systems, services, and processes, employing working methods to integrate people into the entire development process as users and co-creators, to explore, examine, experiment, test and evaluate new ideas, scenarios, processes, systems, concepts and creative solutions in complex and real contexts’ [1]. For those designing and implementing ULL, they are seen as a means through which to set up demonstrations and to trial different kinds of intervention in the city, from relatively simple technical innovations to more complex or integrated measures designed to contribute to urban social and economic development and wider goals of sustainability. They are purposefully intended to bring together multiple actors that seek to intervene in order to address contemporary urban challenges and foster learning through forms of open and engaged experimentation.

What makes ULL distinct is their focus on knowledge and learning as a means through which such interventions can be successfully achieved. ULL aim at co-creation and empowerment of multiple stakeholders in co-shaping of the experimental approach in a ‘triple’ or ‘quadruple’ helix mode of bringing science, policy, business and civil society together [2, 3] and being open and participatory [4]. ULL are also marked by their explicit place-based focus, whether this be concerned with a specific urban site, district or economy. ULL seek to deliver innovative and transformative improvements across the urban milieu, from buildings to green space, transport to energy systems, local food to sustainable forms of consumption [5]. They work within and across urban socio-technical and socio-ecological systems in order to mobilise change. In short, ULL are sites devised to design, test and learn from innovation in real time in order to respond to particular societal, economic and environmental issues in a given urban place [6].

While rapidly growing as an empirical phenomenon, our understanding of the nature and purpose of ULL is still evolving. There are a growing number of accounts of ULL derived from actors who have been involved in establishing ULL or in undertaking analysis of how they have been established and the extent to which they are fulfilling their intended purposes of testing, learning and developing innovation. Given the early stages of the development of ULL, this material tends to primarily be in the grey literature with fewer academic papers having been written to date (though for recent examples see: Refs. [7•, 8•]). There have been fewer perspectives to date that have taken a more critical approach to the analysis of ULL, seeking to investigate the emergence and embedding of this phenomenon within broader logics of urban development and examining their consequences and implications (for a recent and comprehensive exception, see: Ref. [9]).

In this paper, we seek to address this gap by positioning ULL as part of a broader shift in the nature of urban governance in which forms of innovation and experimentation are being marshalled as a means through which to govern particular (urban) conditions [10]. We suggest that ULL are not a stand-alone set of interventions, but part of a wider ‘politics of experimentation’ through which the governing of urban sustainability is increasingly taking place [11, 9•, 12, 4, 13, 14, 15]. While they may be distinct in terms of their concern with the use of data and real-time knowledge in order to generate insight and traction for the forms of intervention they are undertaking, here our focus is not on their capacities to develop learning per se but rather with how they contribute to the emergent experimental approach to responding to sustainability challenges at the urban level. This raises the question if and how such an experimental approach can create an impact beyond their immediate domain and induce transitions across urban socio-technical and socio-ecological systems. A crucial challenge in this regard is how loosely coupled system elements (new technologies, institutions, markets, actor and network constellations) evolve and align into more stable configurations that would be able to replace and transform a current (unsustainable) system.

It has been within the fields of transitions theory and urban governance that the nature and dynamics of urban experimentation have been most closely studied to date. We draw on these broad bodies of work to develop a novel framework to critically understand the existing role and future potential of ULL as part of this broad phenomenon of urban experimentation. This paper therefore focuses on the core concerns within these two approaches, the common ground they share, and the important tensions. Through this process we develop a new perspective that can identify a shared set of concepts and issues to inform the investigation and analysis of ULL in different urban contexts and local conditions.

Section snippets

Understanding ULL as innovation governance and governance innovation

As a means of intervening in the urban arena to address particular sustainability challenges, ULL constitute a particular form of governance innovation. Understanding the means through which they are designed, implemented and take effect can therefore usefully draw on the tradition of innovation studies and socio-technical transitions. This work has examined the role of niches that provide experimentation space for the development, testing and failure of novel innovations in ‘real’ contexts,

Governing the city through ULL

If governing urban sustainability used to be a matter of the development of urban plans and strategy, often informed by processes of environmental assessment and public consultation, ULL in common with other forms of experimentation involve a more interventionist, incremental and ‘learning by doing’ governing approach in which urban sustainability is emergent rather than pre-given. Seeing ULL not only as discrete arenas for research and development, but as part of a broader shift in the ways in

Conclusion

Conceiving of ULL as particular governance projects provides one means through which to conceptualise their role in transformative change. Taken together, this reading of the literature on transitions, power and governance suggests that there is considerable scope to work with a notion of the governance of transitions that pays attention to the dynamic qualities of power as a set of capacities that are constituted through the formation of calculated interventions or projects designed to

References and recommended reading

Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:

  • • of special interest

  • •• of outstanding interest

Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge the support of JPI Urban Europe for the Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions (GUST) project.

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