Urban Living Labs: how to enable inclusive transdisciplinary research?

Abstract

The Urban Living Lab (ULL) approach has the potential to create enabling environments for social learning and to be a successful arena for innovative local collaboration in knowledge co-creation and experimentation in the context of research and practice in sustainability transitions. Nevertheless, complex issues such as the urban Food-Water-Energy (FWE) Nexus present a challenge to the realization of such ULL, especially regarding their inclusiveness.We present ULL as a frame for a local knowledge co-creation and participation approach based on the project "Creating Interfaces - Building capacity for integrated governance at the Food-Water-Energy-nexus in cities on the water". This project aims at making FWE Nexus linkages better understandable to the stakeholders (citizens and associations, city government, science, businesses), and to facilitate cooperation and knowledge exchange among them. This paper focuses on and discusses inclusiveness as a key aspect and challenge of ULLs and on what literature and our experiences in this regard suggest for the advancement of the concept of ULL towards ULL 2.0. These findings often also relate to framing transdisciplinary research in a wider sense.

Examining urban resilience through a food-water-energy nexus lens to understand the effects of climate change

“…51 The Creating Interfaces project centered around the use of citizen science and urban living laboratories (ULL) to facilitate greater community engagement and uptake of methods to improve nexus governance and literacy. 17 , 68 ULLs can mobilize FWE governance and local community involvement as they maintain a central role for citizens, officials, and scholars in the co-creation of knowledge around problems and solutions.…”

Guía metodológica para la implementación de laboratorios transdisciplinarios en Amaluza – Paute: retos y avances desde la educación.

“…La planificación curricular se enfoca en la identificación de desafíos que requieren soluciones creativas y prácticas, mientras que las estrategias de enseñanza-aprendizaje se centran en la generación de ideas, el desarrollo de prototipos y la iteración. La evaluación en el ABD se centra en la calidad del diseño y la efectividad del prototipo desarrollado, así como en la reflexión y mejora continua del proceso de diseño (Laborgne, et al, 2021).…”

Doing Transdisciplinary Action Research: A Critical Assessment of an Italian Lab-Like Sustainable Food Initiative

“…Against this background, living labs are integrated socio-economic tools that include TAR, co-creation and experimentation of potential solutions to sustainability challenges (Scholl et al, 2018). Living labs are then embedded in TAR, being both a space and a tool for multi-stakeholder experimentation and decision-making or, as McCormick Hartmann (2017: 4, cited by Laborgne et al, 2021) put it: "Urban Living Labs can be considered both as an arena (geographically or institutionally bounded spaces), and as an approach for intentional collaborative experimentation of researchers, citizens, companies and local governments. "…”