Urban Living Labs: Towards an Integrated Understanding of their Key Components

Abstract

In today’s ongoing urbanization and escalating climate change, there is an increasing demand on cities to be innovative and inclusive to handle these emerging issues. As an answer to these challenges, and in order to generate and adopt sustainable innovations and nature-based solutions in the urban areas, the concept of urban living labs has emerged. However, to date, there is confusion concerning the concept of the urban living lab and its key components. Some interpret the urban living lab as an approach, others as a single project, and some as a specific place – and some just do not know. In order to unravel this complexity and better understand this concept, we sought to identify the key components of an urban living lab by discussing the perspective of city representatives in the context of an urban living lab project. To achieve this goal, we reviewed previous literature on this topic and carried out two workshops with city representatives, followed by an open-ended questionnaire. In this article, we identify and discuss seven key components of an urban living lab: governance and management structure; financing models; urban context; nature-based solutions; partners and users (including citizens); approach; and ICT and infrastructure. We also offer an empirically derived definition of the urban living lab concept.

Keywords

• definition
• innovation
• key components
• Living lab
• nature-based solutions
• NBS
• ULL
• UNaLab
• urban living lab