Can Behaviorally Informed Urban Living Labs Foster the Energy Transition in Cities?

Abstract

Identifying governance schemes that promote cooperation among urban stakeholders is a priority in a context where rapid urbanization poses multiple and complex challenges for ensuring the sustainability of cities. Smart cities offer promising governance approaches, especially in the framework of the concept of Urban Living Labs (ULLs), as an enabling environment for so-called user-centric co-creation processes. While embedding a potential to promote solutions that tackle the challenges of urbanization, especially in relation to the energy transition, it is not yet clear how ULLs can effectively involve all relevant actors nor the extent of their impact, especially regarding behaviors. The study first analyzes the interplay between the challenge of urban energy transition and local governance schemes. Then, it explores how findings from behavioral sciences can inform the design of ULLs to effectively promote active engagement in the urban energy transition. Finally, it reviews the theoretical findings in relation to the ULL that has been taking shape in the city of Trento, Italy.

An Integrated Framework for Stakeholder and Citizen Engagement in Solar Neighborhoods

“…In this sense, there are several methods such as living labs, which emphasize the dialogue among various stakeholders and citizens and the co-creation processes. A living lab is a real-life environment where innovative products, services, or technologies are co-created, tested, and evaluated enabling usercentric solutions (Della Valle et al, 2021). Living labs aim to understand user needs, preferences, and behaviors to create solutions, directly engaging stakeholders and citizens, which better match their requirements.…”

EU climate action through an energy poverty lens

“…At the same time, energy monitoring enabled by smart meters might yield unintended consequences for citizens, who might be sludged to agree that their data can be used for commercial purposes 57,58 . More particularly, malevolent powerful actors can exploit individuals' tendency to accept the status quo by designing unethical privacy default options 59 . Consequently, policymakers can augment the climate policy package with additional instruments offered by behavioural economics 60 .…”

Social implications of energy infrastructure digitalisation and decarbonisation

“…Between these contrasting models there are, in most real-life cases, hybrids, overlaps and contention. This is especially true in relation to data politics in digitalisation, as access to, control over and collection protocols for data flows in novel infrastructure are typically poorly regulated compared with emergent enablements of innovation (Zuboff 2019;Zook 2017), and this poses exploitation risks especially for the most vulnerable (DellaValle et al 2021). In extreme cases, patterns of digitalisation can only further entrench the scope and power of incumbent technology firms, erode privacy, or lead to increases in household conflict and social control (Iskandarova et al 2022).…”

“…Research on commoning pathways argues that authoritative institutions must promote contexts for collective action by users rather than shifting responsibilities to them (Lennon et al 2020;Rommetveit et al 2021). Without local commoning, digitalisation may fail to shift energy infrastructure away from its current unjust configurations (DellaValle et al 2021), perpetuating a top-down tendency to accumulate and concentrate wealth in a few pockets of privilege through remote cybernetic control, while raising troubling prospects for data justice and accountability as new data flows emerge and their control is institutionalised through emergent forms of digitalised enclosure.…”