Direct Impacts of an Urban Living Lab from the Participants’ Perspective: Livewell Yarra

Abstract

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.

The Living Lab as a Tool to Promote Residents’ Participation in Destination Governance

“…A LL can be described as a user-centric or also user-driven innovation environment, where managers, creators, and all kinds of users interact in developing innovations with a social and economic impact [27]. So far it has been applied with a resident focus in different disciplines [101][102][103], but it still lacks widely accepted definitions and frameworks [104] or knowledge about cooperative mechanisms for innovation [105,106]. In tourism, the LL has only been introduced a few times [25,107,108].…”

“…The LL could assist this transition by providing a space for testing and experimenting [134], for example on mobility and governmental services. A strength of the LL is that residents can already be involved in an early planning phase [103]. The publications on Life & Work focus also on governance issues [135], but proceed towards local entrepreneurship [107], social innovation [136], or the design of the future workplace [137].…”

“…well-being and sustainability, including social innovation [136], the creation of prosperous communities [141], the transition to more sustainable lifestyles [103], or sustainability thinking [141,144].…”

Applying an RRI Filter in Key Learning on Urban Living Labs’ Performance

“…Outcomes which are intended mainly refer to creation of new solutions, in particular, a better user-quality of them, eventually bringing more sustainability innovation quicker to market [30,59]. A deeper understanding of the learning processes and collaborations themselves is also often seen as part of intended outcomes of living labs [29,59,67,68].…”

“…In urban practice today, however, the methodology has often been adopted only in part, with emphasis on early stages like ideation, experimental design, demonstration and testing [8,9,22,[25][26][27][28].Despite urban living labs having become a popular tool in modern urban development and transition, assessments of their performance and required learning have lagged behind. While there are many studies of individual projects [29,30] there is a lack of systematic studies on the meta-level, meaning that factors influencing outcomes of urban living labs have remained largely unknown. Exceptions are mostly (very) recent in time using (small) sets of case studies, among others published in handbooks on methodology and recent journal papers [22][23][24][25][26][27][28]31,32].…”