Urban Living Lab

urban living lab

Urban Living Labs represent an approach to city governance, in which stakeholders are involved in new ways of dealing with urban challenges, by means of experimental, real-life projects. They appear to be a particularly promising, innovative form of governance to address complex urban challenges and create public value (EU 2011). However, successful implementation of Urban Living Labs requires further elaboration and guidelines, with respect to: which issues they could be applied to, how they should be organized and how to integrate them with formal local government structures. (De Kraker et al. 2016)

For the Glocull project and its involved case studies the nexus‘ function is twofold:

• The cases involved in GLOCULL cover a broad spectrum of sustainability challenges. As the cases are situated in real-world systems and address real-world problems, their topical focus is not limited to one specific issue.
• The FWE nexus provides topical guidance for the integration of the involved case studies and the cross-case evaluation of outputs and outcomes.

• The focus on the FWE Nexus furthermore highlights the strong acknowledgement of interlinkages and interactions of these systems both locally and globally, and as such provides a further perspective for reflection of the involved case studies that is still widely lacking in sustainaiblity research (cf. Lang et al. 2017)

» De Kraker, J.; Cörvers, R.; Scholl, C.; van Wanroij, T. (2016): Urban labs – a new approach in the governance of sustainable urban development. in Cörvers, R.; de Kraker, J.; Kemp, R.; Martens, P.; van Lente, H.; (eds) Sustainable Development Research at ICIS: Taking stock and looking ahead. Datawyse / Universitaire Pers Maastricht

»European Union (EU) (2011): Cities of tomorrow: challenges, visions, ways forward. European Commission Directorate General for Regional Policy, Brussels