Urban Living Labs Experimenting with City Futures

All cities face a pressing challenge – how can they provide economic prosperity and social cohesion while achieving environmental sustainability? In response, new collaborations are emerging in the form of urban living labs – sites devised to design, test and learn from social and technical innovation in real time.The aim of this volumeis to examine, inform and advance the governance of sustainability transitions through urban living labs. Notably, urban living labs are proliferating rapidly across the globe as a means through which public and private actors are testing innovations in buildings, transport and energy systems. Yet despite the experimentation taking place on the ground, we lack systematic learning and international comparison across urban and national contexts about their impacts and effectiveness. We have limited knowledge on how good practice can be scaled up to achieve the transformative change required. This book brings together leading international researchers within a systematic comparative framework for evaluating the design, practices and processes of urban living labs to enable the comparative analysis of their potential and limits. It provides new insights into the governance of urban sustainability and how to improve the design and implementation of urban living labs in order to realise their potential.

Introduction Design of ULL Urban Living Labs: Catalysing Low Carbon and Sustainable Cities in Europe? Yuliya Voytenko Palgan, Kes McCormick and James Evans Putting urban experiments into context: Integrating Urban Living Labs and city-regional priorities. Mike Hodson, James Evans and Gabriele Schliwa Urban living labs for the smart grid: Experimentation, governmentality, and urban energy transitions Anthony M. Levenda Smart City Construction: towards an analytical framework for urban living labs Practices of ULL Intermediation and learning in Stellenbosch’s Urban Living Lab Megan Davies and Mark Swilling Bringing Urban Living Labs to Communities: Enabling processes of transformation Janice Astbury and Harriet Bulkeley HomeLabs: Domestic living laboratories under conditions of austerity Anna Davies Urban living labs, ’smart’ innovation and the realities of every day access to energy Vanesa Castán Broto Processes of ULL 15-years and still living: The Basel Pilot Region laboratory and Switzerland’s pursuit of a 2000-Watt Society Gregory Trencher, Achim Geissler, Yasuhiro Yamanaka Agency, space, and partnerships: Exploring key dimensions of Urban Living Labs in Vancouver, Canada Sarah Burch, Alex Graham and Carrie Mitchell Placing sustainability in communities: emerging urban living labs in China Qianqing Mai The importance of place for urban transition experiments: Understanding the embeddedness of urban living labs Frank van Steenbergen and Niki Frantzeskaki Conclusion Index

Simon Marvin is Director of the Urban Institute and Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield, UK Harriet Bulkeley is Professor of Geography at Durham University, UK. Lindsay Mai is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Geography at Durham University, UK. Kes McCormick is an Associate Professor and Assistant Head at the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics (IIIEE) at Lund University, Sweden. Yuliya Voytenko Palgan is an Assistant Professor at Lund University, Sweden.