Urban living labs have emerged as transition arenas for undertaking process-oriented and reflexive experiments in the multi-stakeholder governance of sustainability. This paper evaluates Livewell Yarra, an urban living lab in Melbourne, Australia, that brought together academic researchers and community actors to engage in experiments for low-carbon living. This paper evaluates transition team experiments in governance of the lab itself and community experiments in carbon reduction that took place in people's homes and small group settings known as decarb groups. This paper's primary research question is: what are the direct impacts of urban living lab experiments from the participants' perspective? The research methods utilised include action research, asset-based community development, participatory co-design and most significant change research. This paper evaluates experiments in low-carbon living through data collected via stories of change from participant interviews. The results indicate that experiments in urban living labs create opportunities for social learning and empowerment, but also raise issues of leadership and ownership of transition governance. The findings suggest that Livewell Yarra could have benefited from clearer agenda setting and continuous monitoring to feedback results. The paper concludes by suggesting future research directions that utilise the operational processes of transition management to support experiments in urban living labs.
Urban living labs have emerged as spatially embedded arenas for governing urban transformation, where heterogenous actor configurations experiment with new practices, institutions, and infrastructures. This article observes a nascent shift towards experimentation at the precinct scale and responds to a need to further investigate relevant processes in urban experimentation at this scale, and identifies particular challenges for urban planning. We tentatively conceptualise precincts as spatially bounded urban environments loosely delineated by a particular combination of social or economic activity. Our methodology involves an interpretive systematic literature review of urban experimentation and urban living labs at precinct scale, along with an empirical illustration of the Net Zero Initiative at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, which is operationalising its main campus into a living lab focussed on precinct-scale decarbonisation. We identify four processual categories relevant to precinct-scale experimentation: embedding, framing, governing, and learning. We use the empirical illustration to discuss the relevance of these processes, refine findings from the literature review and conclude with a discussion on the implications of our article for future scholarship on urban planning by experiment at precinct scale.
Data governance is an emerging field of study concerned with how a range of actors can successfully manage data assets according to rules of engagement, decision rights, and accountabilities. Urban studies scholarship has continued to demonstrate and criticize lack of community engagement in smart city development and urban data governance projects, including in local sustainability initiatives. However, few move beyond critique to unpack in more detail what community engagement should look like. To overcome this gap, we develop and test a participatory methodology to identify approaches to empowering community engagement in data governance in the context of the Monash Net Zero Precinct in Melbourne, Australia. Our approach uses design for social innovation to enable a small group of “precinct citizens” to co-design prototypes and multicriteria mapping as a participatory appraisal method to open up and reveal a diversity of perspectives and uncertainties on data governance approaches. The findings reveal the importance of creating deliberative spaces for pluralising community engagement in data governance that consider the diverse values and interests of precinct citizens. This research points toward new ways to conceptualize and design enabling processes of community engagement in data governance and reflects on implementation strategies attuned to the politics of participation to support the embedding of these innovations within specific socio-institutional contexts.
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