EDIT: Listen to the recording of the webinar on our Youtube channel, here.
Welcome to a webinar about Urban Living Labs 2.0. What does “success” mean in the context of urban experimentation and Urban Living Labs (and how do you get there in practice?) Can Urban Living Lab approcahes be tools for capacity building on wicked issues? It is time to make the investment in Urban Living Labs more sustainable and the learning more integrated.
Urban Living Labs have over the recent decade become a common type of co-creative experimentation, offering us the opportunity to research and innovate on a wide variety of challenges in everyday setting and test hypotheses and elements to pathways for making transitions towards urban sustainable living. Europe seems particularly a hotspot for this approach. A typical Urban Living Lab will run for as long as a project (usually three years) and after this period data is collected, results are drawn together, a summary is written and, in some situations, changes in the wider urban context happen. However, mounting concern by practice, innovators, and research is that this last step is too rare and after the project funding stops there is little systematic integration of any of the practical outputs. Is it really about “scaling up” successful results, or rather about “scaling across”? In sum, the intended and potential contribution by Urban Living Labs to urban transformation seems unfulfilled. In this webinar we explore going beyond Urban Living Labs towards a different paradigm offered by Living Labs 2.0…
- How can cities, innovators and researchers best synthesize and make use of results from many different successful test beds, labs and urban experimenting?
- Can Urban Living Lab approcahes be tools for capacity building on wicked issues?
- How might we integrate Urban Living Labs approaches into the DNA of Urban Governance? Should we?
Bring your knowledge, projects and concerns to this webinar. Participate and exchnage in the chat, Q&A and polls.
Meet…
- Claire Gordon is a Senior Researcher at Social Life (@SL_cities)an independent research organisation created by the Young Foundation in 2012 to work internationally on innovation and placemaking. As part of the Bright Future project (JPI Urban Europe ENSUF call), Social Life has been leading a process exploring how locally-driven social innovation can help respond to the needs of industrial towns in Slovenia, Romania, the Netherlands, Finland and the UK. Alongside this, Claire has worked on a range of place-based projects exploring the dynamics of neighbourhoods and how they are impacted and can be supported through development or regeneration. Prior to joining Social Life, Claire worked as a researcher examining market approaches in development at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London and at the University of Oxford. Her background is in the not-for-profit sector, having spent several years at a digital inclusion NGO in Brazil.
- Michiel Dehaene is associate professor at the department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ghent University, where he teaches courses in urban analysis and design. He is the chairman of the Flemish Jury of Urban Renewal Projects in Flanders. His work focuses on sub-urban renewal, the (planning) history of dispersed urban development, and sustainable cities. His research includes systematic work on planning and design models to address the urbanizaton of food. Michiel currently works with the project “Urbanising in Place” (JPI Urban Europe SUGI call) which seeks to define components of an “agroecological urbanism”: a model of urbanisation which places food, metabolic cycles and an ethics of land stewardship, equality and solidarity at its core. The project works with communities of practice in in both South America and in Europe: Rosario, Riga, Brussels and London.
- Jochen Wendel is a researcher at the European Institute for Energy Research (EIFER) in Karlsruhe, Germany. He is coordinating, together with Pia Laborgne, the SUGI nexus project Creating Interfaces project running Urban Living Labs in Poland, Romania and the U.S. They work with capacity building for the urban food-water-energy (FWE) -nexus, making the FWE-linkages understandable to the stakeholders (city government, science, business and citizens), and facilitating cooperation and knowledge exchange among them by using innovative approaches for local knowledge co-creation and participation through Urban Living Labs and Citizen Science. His background is in GIScience and he received his PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. Prior to the Creating Interfaces project, Jochen has worked on several projects related to smart cities applications, location-based services, and data visualization with several state agencies and private companies in the US and Germany. Pia Laborgne is sociologist and researcher at the European Institute for Energy Research (EIFER), focusing on urban sustainability strategies, e.g. regarding citizen participation, citizen science and stakeholder cooperation. With Jochen Wendel, she is coordinating the SUGI nexus project “Creating Interfaces”.
- Participants from anywhere in the world who will join the conversation through the chat room, polls and Q&A sessions. Previous Urban Lunch Talks have attracted visitors from more than twenty different countries, representing urban administration and public authorities, research community, business representatives and civil society.
- Your rapporteur, Johannes Riegler, Stakeholder Involvement Officer in JPI Urban Europe.
- Your host, Caroline Wrangsten, urban geographer and Assistant Project Manager in JPI Urban Europe.