Collection
Beyond Urban Living Labs: The making of transformative urban innovation systems
Cities and urban areas are in an extreme state of flux, with systemic change and transformation occurring on many fronts. Against the backdrop of continued urbanization at a global scale, pressing sustainability challenges are rising that require urban responses: From decarbonization, renaturation and climate adaptation to economic restructuring, digitalization or epidemic resilience – the range of demands for deep urban change is wide.
Over the last decade, the Urban Living Lab (ULL) has emerged as a new type of intervention format for leveraging systemic urban change, mostly linked to the pursuit of sustainability goals ULLs have been characterized as local settings within which researchers and stakeholders interact to design and run experiments (social, ecological, technological), generate feedback and social learning, and contribute to a more strategic urban innovation and transformation agenda (cf. Nevens et al., 2012; Schneidewind, 2014; Baccarne et al., 2016; Schäpke et al., 2018).
As ULLs started to quickly proliferate, many scholars recognized this as a substantive ‘experimental turn’ in urban governance and planning, analyzing the variety of emerging ULL designs (location, organization, governance, methods, etc.) and the particular forms of interaction between science and society they involve, especially considering co-creation, reflexivity and learning (Bulkeley et al., 2016; Evans et al., 2016; Scholl and Kemp, 2016; Voytenko et al., 2016; Puerari et al., 2018; Kronsell and Mukhtar-Landgren, 2018). This has raised various critical issues regarding the politics and transformative impacts of ULLs.
With the first generations of ULLs now completed or coming of age, however, their perception as temporally and spatially confined interventions has started to change, considering their role within wider approaches to develop urban transformative capacity (cf. Wolfram, 2016). Questions are thus surfacing regarding the urban context dynamics within which ULLs are embedded (Torrens et al., 2018), or the strategies pursued by ULLs to enable and initiate a broader diffusion of the innovations generated (von Wirth et al., 2018). Especially among researchers and practitioners engaged in ULL development, there is now an active debate about emerging models of ‘ULL 2.0’ - a novel approach aiming towards a ‘transformative urban innovation system’, with a wider group of stakeholders, broader portfolio, deeper layers of value, and further links between cause and effect.
Therefore, this special issue aims to build on some of the most significant experiences and lessons from analyzing the ‘ULL 1.0’ phase, in order to identify and outline the contours and likely directions for a forthcoming ULL 2.0 model and way of working. Papers are invited on the retrospective-prospective axis (from ‘ULL 1.0 to ULL 2.0’), taking a local, national, EU and/or global perspective.
Editors
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Marc Wolfram
Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development/Dresden University of Technology, Germany
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Joe Ravetz
Manchester University, United Kingdom
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Christian Scholl
Maastricht University, The Netherlands
Articles (5 in this collection)
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Urban Living Labs: how to enable inclusive transdisciplinary research?
Authors (first, second and last of 11)
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Experimentation or projectification of urban change? A critical appraisal and three steps forward
Authors
