After Urban Living Labs
After Urban Living Labs: Learning strategies among ULL practitioners and urban governance
BACKGROUND/HISTORY AND CONTEXT OF THE WORKSHOP
Since 2012, JPI Urban Europe has funded more than 80 transnational research and innovation projects supporting transitions towards urban sustainability. About half of the projects have implemented Urban Living Labs (ULL) which use flexible and innovative ways to address, co-create and experiment on societal challenges in everyday urban settings as well as with new policies, co-design and test new methods to tackle specific urban challenges and for exploring new governance models under outside the conventional R&I laboratories. Throughout the last years, JPI Urban Europe projects have generated comprehensive experiences and knowledge around the implementing of (See e.g. https://jpi-urbaneurope.eu/projects/).
However, a number of challenges to the approach now requires our attention:
– How to sustain an Urban Living Lab or its findings, results, or procedures beyond the duration of a project?
– How to ensure that the results make an impact beyond the ULL?
– How can the contribution of ULL be facilitated to support overall Urban Transformations towards Sustainability?
MAIN AIM / OBJECTIVE
Building upon the findings and recent publications of a number of JPI Urban Europe funded projects and literature on increasing the impact of ULL , the workshop to involve a wider set of Living Lab practitioners to learn from their experiences, derive requirements, to learn on the JPI Urban Europe programme-level how these challenges can be tackled. Therefore the aims can be summed up as:
– Collecting successful examples of Urban Living Labs that endured after the end of the initiating project
– Understand the framework conditions on how these ULLs were sustainable
– Develop models/frameworks for JPI Urban Europe to ensure continued learning beyond project logics and to support long term science-policy-society-business collaboration
EXPECTED OUTCOMES
– Participants will learn from the hands-on experience of JPI Urban Europe funded projects, particularly from the GUST, URB@EXP and SmarterLabs projects
– Participants will exchange overview of literature/guidelines published on scaling up ULL
– Experiences of sustainable (and non-sustainable) ULLs will be exchanged and determining factors will be analysed
– Outcomes will be used in the strategic programming of JPI Urban Europe, particularly for the development of funding instruments which allow long term learning/experimentation/science-policy-society-business collaboration
BRIEF OUTLINE / METHODOLOGY
Introductory Presentations (15-20min):
We would like to keep the time of presenting to a minimum, nevertheless, it is important to briefly point the context of the workshop (see above). Additionally, a brief input to the work of JPI UE funded projects plus academic literature on upscaling ULL and continuous learning will be given.
Collecting experiences (15min):
Participants are asked to pitch (1min max) cases of ULLs and highlight:
– Geographical scope of the lab
– Involved organisations
– Thematic orientation
– Why the lab was/is successful
Discussions / Exchange (45min) in groups Summary / Wrap up / Outlook on how the results will be used in JPI Urban Europe (10min)