Innovations in urban governance such as Urban Living Labs (ULL) are expected to accelerate the transition towards more sustainable and climate-resilient cities. This article reviews different ULL across Europe and explores the role and potential capacity of municipalities in the development of and/or facilitation of ULL as a form of experimental governance. It focuses on the role of the public sector in the multi-actor collaborations that often characterize experimental governance. The article draws on literature on cities in sustainability, climate and environmental governance, and bridges this with political science literature on governance. Based on institutional theory that emphasizes roles, identities, and perceived and actual acting space, three functional roles for the municipality are singled outpromoter, enabler and partnerin a framework with a set of indicators that are used to analyse 50 case studies of ULL (http://www.urbanlivinglabs.net). The aim is to advance knowledge on how municipalities can facilitate urban sustainability through experimental governance.
The local governments of EU member countries are attracted to the possibility of receiving EU funding. However, as the governance structures of EU funds are complex and dynamic, municipalities are increasingly drawing on the knowledge and resources of 'EU experts' who mediate and provide project support. This article contributes to our understanding of how EU cohesion policy is translated through EU projects, with a specific focus on the processes of preparing and applying for project funding. Drawing on education policy, this study analyses a tool which has been developed to facilitate and increase the number of EU projects in the Swedish region of Scania. The analysis shows that regional mediation -and the ambition to reframe local policies into EU projectsentails substantive as well as organizational changes in two aspects. First, the policy content shifts from the realm of education policy to the realms of collaborative development policy, social cohesion and innovation, and second, the translation entails an organizational shift from permanent public education administration to temporary project organizations. These processes are conceptualized as the re-compartmentalization of local policies.
Urban planning is, in many countries, increasingly becoming intertwined with local climate ambitions, investments in urban attractiveness and “smart city” innovation measures. In the intersection between these trends, urban experimentation has developed as a process where actors are granted action space to test innovations in a collaborative setting. One arena for urban experimentation is urban testbeds. Testbeds are sites of urban development, in which experimentation constitutes an integral part of planning and developing the area. This article introduces the notion of testbed planning as a way to conceptualize planning processes in delimited sites where planning is combined with processes of urban experimentation. We define testbed planning as a multi-actor, collaborative planning process in a delimited area, with the ambition to generate and disseminate learning while simultaneously developing the site. The aim of this article is to explore processes of testbed planning with regard to the role of urban planners. Using an institutional logics perspective we conceptualize planners as navigating between a public sector—and an experimental logic. The public sector logic constitutes the formal structure of “traditional” urban planning, and the experimental logic a collaborative and testing governance structure. Using examples from three Nordic municipalities, this article explores planning roles in experiments with autonomous buses in testbeds. The analysis shows that planners negotiate these logics in three different ways, combining and merging them, separating and moving between them or acting within a conflictual process where the public sector logic dominates.
In the light of increasing urban challenges, municipalities are developing and advancing new forms of governing. One such example is 'urban experimentation', a process where city-based innovation processes are initiated to test solutions thatif deemed successfulare intended to be scaled up with the ambition to leverage a broader urban sustainability transition. Research on experimental governance has shown that municipalities can play various roles in these processes, including the role as enabler. The article contributes to the literature on the roles of public actors in urban experimentation on sustainability challenges by advancing understanding of the less studied 'enabler' role. We probe the politics of enabling by focusing on the policy instruments employed by municipalities. Our aim is to provide deeper insights into the everyday work of urban administrations when they act in the 'enabler' role. One particular approach of urban experimentation is Urban Living Labs (ULL), and this paper analyses ULL that address sustainability challenges. Along the four dimensions of nodality, authority, treasury, and organisation, we identify the politics of enabling in four ULL examples from Sweden and the Netherlands.
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