سیاست نامه علم و فناوری (May 2024)
A Review of Urban Living Labs Experiences with Emphasis on the Implementation of Environment-Based Smart Cities
Abstract
Problem Statement: During the last two decades, many cities in the world have followed the idea of the ‘smart city’ to solve the issues of urban planning and governance using the capacity of modern information and communication technologies. Past experiences in this regard indicate one of the biggest challenges for the implementation of smart cities, which is generally not related to the technology itself, but to the problems that occur during the implementation of the idea, which is mainly due to the lack of a common and clear strategy between the stakeholders to realize the smart cities. After changing the development paradigms from closed innovation to open innovation, the gap created by the presence of people in the innovation process and the pressure of technology made the urban policymakers move towards the design of a network of all stakeholders in environments named Urban Living Labs (ULLs). Objective: The present study aims to clarify the concept of ULLs by a systematic review of the successful cities in the world in terms of the open innovation paradigm based on smart environments. Methods and Materials: The present study is applied in terms of the objective and library-based in terms of data collection. Accordingly, the written documents of 16 ULL experiences from 2007 to 2022 were analyzed by systematic review based on the subject, objective, necessity of project implementation, and output. Findings: The findings indicate that smart cities concentrate on citizens’ and users’ participation with other stakeholders to create innovative services and realize social co-creation. Conclusion: Based on the experiences, the low level of citizens’ education is among the very important challenges for the realization of smart cities.
