Abstract
Urban living labs is a practical methodology in improving sustainability in cities by facilitating collaborative learning and innovation in a real-life environment, thereby mainly responding to the needs of users (citizens). The paper aims to filter a list of key learnings on urban living labs through the lens of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). One of the motivations is that key learnings on urban living labs are mainly derived from means-goal effectiveness (MGE) thinking while the urban setting calls for a broader perspective due to complexity and tension from the multi-actor, multifunctional, and multi-scalar character of cities. The filtering reveals almost 40 learnings as ‘overlap’ and ‘exclusive for MGE’. Importantly, five learnings are identified as specific for RRI and potentially enriching living lab methodology: ethical and normative principles like health, safety, security, and equality between societal groups, and a wider distribution of benefits and risks of living lab outcomes, in particular, contradictory sustainability issues. The RRI filtering causes three practical implications: coping with uneven power distribution between stakeholders, limited feasibility of applying the comprehensive learning framework, and challenges of overarching platform structures enabling to better incorporate RRI concerns in living lab methodology. The findings as presented in an adapted list are new, as RRI values and concerns have seldom been applied to practical innovation and have never been explicitly applied to urban living labs’ performance beyond the borders of effectiveness thinking.
Highlights
The last decade has seen many local initiatives to make cities more innovative and develop solutions to sustainability problems
The results contribute to Research and Innovation (RRI) and urban planning/policy literature as they include the first design of an RRI filter to mainly means-goal effectiveness thinking in urban living lab methodology, or broader, urban experimentation in policy-making
This paper provided steps towards a list of learnings on living labs performance that can be used in design and implementation, as well as in monitoring and evaluation, and this list is different from previous ones due to using responsible research and innovation (RRI) as a filter
Summary
The last decade has seen many local initiatives to make cities more innovative (smart) and develop solutions to sustainability problems Part of these initiatives, living labs, is meant to facilitate collaborative learning and experimentation in a real-life environment, in which the needs of users, mainly citizens, play an important role [1,2,3,4,5]. Urban living labs are blossoming more than ever before, being driven by calls for acceleration of sustainability improvement e.g., in energy, transport and health systems [6,7,8,9,10], and fitting into two broader societal trends These trends are decentralization of (some) public tasks and increased decision-power (participation) of citizens on urban services and enabling users (consumers) to play an important role in innovation (co-creation) [11,12,13,14]. In Europe, most early experience with user-innovation in living labs has been gained in ICT-based innovation in the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL), a platform established in 2006 to foster
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