(deze publicatie is in het engels)
In response to urban challenges, new collaborations are emerging in the form of urban living labs. The Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions (GUST) project aims to examine, inform, and advance the governance of sustainability transitions through Urban Living Labs. The GUST Handbook, exploring characteristics, practices and examples of urban living labs, is available now.
Is experimentation a way to plan, design and innovate urban planning? Urban Living Labs are sites developed to design, test, and learn from social and technical innovation in real time. Individual cases have been studied, but limited work has been done to understand how Urban Living Labs work across different national contexts, and how we can scale-up their impact and share lessons across European cities.
The GUST project develops a systematic framework for evaluating the design, practices, and processes of Urban Living Labs and for conducting comparative analysis of their potential and their limitations. Moreover, new insights into the governance of urban sustainability and improvements to the design and implementation will help Urban Living Labs to reach their full potential.
The urban living labs approach offers a way to foster new collaborative, trans-disciplinary ways of thinking in urban planning and development, and provides a real-world testing ground for urban innovation and transformation. The GUST handbook aims to bring open innovation and co-creation to urban policy makers and change agents in Europe and beyond, by offering an introduction into the basic concepts and principles of urban living labs. The handbook offers an insight on types, designs, examples and a quick assessment framework to enable learning about urban living labs.
