Urban Living Labs and Critical Infrastructure Resilience: A Global Match?

Abstract

The challenges to public policy brought by climate change are some of the biggest challenges for cities around the world. These challenges are costlier and more substantial for low-income communities given the existence of their greater social and economic vulnerability. Among the existing tools, this paper highlights the role played by urban living labs (ULLs), which have been discussed in the literature as a booster of urban resilience in a more sustainable direction. By considering ULLs as strategic institutional arrangements that seek resilience for the critical urban infrastructure challenges of climate change, the main target of this paper is to analyze ULLs as a strategy for increasing critical infrastructure resilience in the region of the Global South. These labs were initiated in developed countries, so we can ask: How are developing countries adapting this strategy in order to mitigate the problems of climate change? To achieve this goal, we reviewed previous literature on ULLs, specifically looking for case studies with ULL projects and highlighting the processes of public innovation policies and transfers of knowledge between countries; in order to complement our empirical analysis, we carried out a case study on Brazil. Despite the limitations of the sample, the data suggest the existence of different barriers to the implementation of ULL projects in Brazil compared to those in European cities.

Urban labs beyond Europe: the formation and contextualization of experimental climate governance in five Latin American cities

“…. are quite different from those in the European context” (Amorim et al, 2022, page 11). The edited book by Marvin et al (2018a) also contains case studies of ULs in Africa and Asia but their comparative results are limited.…”

“… 20. In their literature review of ULLs, Amorim et al (2022) found that 95 per cent of the studies in their sample covered ULLs in the global North (86 per cent in Europe) and concluded that “ULLs can be characterized as a European phenomenon” with the cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam together having more ULLs than any country (Amorim et al, 2022, page 9). …”