GUST in Australia

Prof. Lars Coenen from the GUST project presented at an event organised by the Australian Living Labs Innovation Network in Brisbane, Australia. The event attracted participants from a range of sectors. Prof. Lars Coenen is based at Melbourne University and remains connected with Lund University. He talked about the type of innovation in urban living labs and the typology developed by the GUST project.

Yuliya Voytenko presents GUST in Brussels

Yuliya Voytenko presented the GUST project on 29 May 2017 in Brussels, Belgium at the JPI Urban Europe policy meeting.

Learning from Infra-Labs

Infra-Labs are research activities that establish a collaborative process of conducting in-situ analysis and collecting data from those involved in or affected by urban strategies or community initiatives. The GUST project organized 3 Infra-Labs in Lund (Sweden), Graz (Austria), and Newcastle (UK) to investigate the workings of urban living labs.

Infra-Labs are about bringing contrasting views of the stakeholders into dialogues that allow voices and elements within any research setting to be made more visible. The approach is an innovative methodology, which allows in-depth reflection and critical engagement. The GUST project developed a policy brief that presents the main lessons from 3 Infra-Labs.

Policy and Practice Workshop in the UK

The policy and practice workshop on urban living labs in the UK gathered researchers, policy makers and innovation agencies in a programme focused on drawing out effective learning from practices of urban experimentation in Europe to shed light on future urban research and policy priorities. Urban living labs represent a distinct form of experimental governance because of their explicit concern on fostering partnerships for learning in the city. Urban living labs constitute a structured form of knowledge production that has been presented with visions for urban futures. The GUST project developed a policy brief to summarise the key findings from the workshop.

GUST at ICLEI Resilient Cities Conference

Timo von Wirth from the GUST project presented a poster and flyers at the ICLEI Resilient Cities Conference in Bonn, Germany. Our poster presented the development of our handbook on urban living labs. The handbook is for practitioners designing, implementing and evaluating urban living labs. The GUST project plans to publish the handbook in June 2017.

Collaborative research to speed up the sustainable transition of cities

The Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions (GUST) research project is soon coming to an end. It has explored the concept of Urban Living Labs, and has involved four research organisations and cities in Sweden, the UK, Austria and the Netherlands. One outcome from the project will be a handbook full of ideas for the transition to more sustainable cities to be used as an inspiration for urban stakeholders.

Read about the activities and outcomes of the GUST project!

Handbook - Urban Living Labs

The GUST team is in the final stages of developing a handbook on urban living labs. It is entitled "The Emerging Landscape of Urban Living Labs: Characteristics, Practices and Examples". It contains a wealth of information about the concepts and principles of urban living labs as well as practical examples and further opportunities for learning. The handbook is designed for stakeholders involved in the design and development of urban living labs or similar participatory activities.

Final Event - GUST at IST

The GUST project team will hold a final event at the IST (International Sustainability Transitions) conference in Gothenburg, Sweden. It will take the form of a dialogue session on advancing urban living labs with presentations on the key findings from the GUST project.

Time: 10.15 - 11.45
Date: Monday 19 June 2017
Place: Gothenburg, Sweden

Urban living labs are proliferating across Europe as a means for testing innovations in buildings, transport and energy systems. They refer to governance and policy experiments that draw on urban sites devised to design, test and learn from social and technical innovation in real time and in real places.

Urban Living Labs in Australia

Prof. Annica Kronsell and Prof. Lars Coenen from the GUST project discuss urban living labs in Europe and Australia.

New publication by the GUST team

Urban Living Labs (ULL) are advanced as an explicit form of intervention delivering sustainability goals for cities. Established at the boundaries between research, innovation and policy, ULL are intended to design, demonstrate and learn about the effects of urban interventions in real time. While rapidly growing as an empirical phenomenon, our understanding of the nature and purpose of ULL is still evolving. While much of the existing literature draws attention to the aims and workings of ULL, there have to date been fewer critical accounts that seek to understand their purpose and implications. In this paper, we suggest that transition studies and the literature on urban governance offer important insights that can enable us to address this gap.

Download a copy of this new publication!

Harriet Bulkeley, Lars Coenen, Niki Frantzeskaki, Christian Hartmann, Annica Kronsell, Lindsay Mai, Simon Marvin, Kes McCormick, Frank van Steenbergen and Yuliya Voytenko Palgan (2017) Urban living labs: Governing urban sustainability transitions, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability.

GUST in Australia

Innovations in urban governance such as Urban Living Labs (ULL) are expected to accelerate the transition toward more sustainable and climate resilient cities. This has been investigated through 50 snap-shots and 16 in-depth case studies in the Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions (GUST) project. This talk and seminar presents a study that explores the role of urban governments in facilitating ULL as a form of experimental governance. The framework for analysis draws on literature on the governance of sustainability transitions, municipal governance and institutional theory. It emphasizes actor roles in governance focusing on perceived and actual acting space. Three functional roles for the municipality are singled out: promoter, enabler andpartner.

What: Seminar on Municipalities in Urban Living Labs
Who: Annica Kronsell and Chris Ryan from the GUST project
When: Thursday 23 March 2017
Where: Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne

GUST team meets in the Netherlands

The GUST team gathered at DRIFT in the Netherlands on the 8 to 9 February 2017 to present and discuss progress on the analysis of snap shots and case studies, and the development of the edited book, special issue and practitioner handbook, and up coming events!

Policy workshop on urban living labs in London, UK

On 27 January 2017, the GUST project organised a policy workshop in London, UK to present findings on urban living labs. The workshop examined the comparative experiences of urban living labs in cities in Europe to draw out critical lessons for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of urban experimentation in the UK context. Invited participants covered a range of domains, including sponsoring different forms of urban experimentation, shaping urban policy practice and debates, or developing best practice in urban policy.

Catalyzing Sustainable Cities through Urban Living Labs

On 1 December 2016, Kes McCormick presented some findings from the GUST project at the Sustainable City Development conference in Malmö, Sweden. Urban Living Labs (ULLs) have emerged as an approach to experimentation in real-life city settings. They can be defined as sites (buildings, streets, and districts) devised to design, test and learn from social and technical innovation in real time. Despite increasing numbers of ULLs in Sweden, Europe and around the world, there is still a lack of understanding of their effectiveness and methodology, and it is unclear whether they contribute to transitions towards more sustainable cities in a substantial way despite holding great promise.

This paper seeks to examine how ULLs can contribute to the development of sustainable cities by exploring four ULLs located in three cities in Sweden: Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. While the cases differed in their focus and practices, they all apply an experimental approach to urban development. Some ULLs have visions and goals with a clear connection to sustainable development. Others have more open ended visions, allowing the users of the ULLs to co-create knowledge and promote learning. Yet others seek to develop inclusive urban planning methods to be used on a large scale to improve the governance of city development.

GUST at European Week of Regions and Cities

On 13 October 2016, Yuliya Voytenko from the GUST team presented as a keynote speaker at the European Week of Regions and Cities in Brussels, Belgium, where she talked about Urban Living Labs and Governing Sustainability Transitions in Cities. She participated in the session on "Sustained and sustainable economic growth: Balancing economic and ecological development in cities and regions".

GUST Team Meets in Lund

The GUST team gathered in Lund, Sweden on 5-7 October 2016 for intensive meetings on our combined research on urban living labs from across Europe. We focused on presenting our case studies and snap shots, and developing our understanding of the design, practices and processes of urban living labs. We are working on our Edited Book, Special Issue and Practitioner Handbook for 2017.

Meta-governance in collaboration for urban innovation

Annica Kronsell presented a GUST working paper on meta-governance in collaboration for urban innovation focusing on the local politics and administration in urban living labs for sustainability transitions. The presentation was part of a workshop on innovative urban governance for mitigation and adaptation at Amsterdam University on 22-23 September 2016, which was organized by INOGOV. The keynote speaker was Prof. Kristine Kern on cities in climate governance.

Urban Transitions Global Summit

The inaugural Urban Transitions Global Summit was organised in Shanghai, China on 5-9 September 2016. Lindsay Mai from the GUST team presented part of the project outputs in a conference workshop. The presentation compares a case study on MK:Smart in Milton Keynes with the smart city programme in a newly urbanised town in the Pearl River Delta of China. The conference rendered an inter-disciplinary platform for urban studies and new collaboration potentials were created based on shared research interests on multi-scale governance innovations.

Snap Shots of Urban Living Labs

The GUST project has developed 40 snap shots of urban living labs from Sweden, the UK, the Netherlands, Austria and across Europe. And there is another 10 snap shots under development as well as publications to provide analysis of the lessons and insights from these examples.

Pathway Politics

Several members of the GUST team (Harriet Bulkeley, James Evans and Kes McCormick) organised a session at the RGS-IBG conference in London, UK on 31 August 2016. The session, entitled Pathway Politics, explored the geographies of power, practice and publics in the making of transitions with presentations across many areas and concepts, including urban living labs.