Abstract
Urban Living Labs (ULLs) are widely believed to provide a safe environment for experimentation, co-creation and evaluation of innovations in real-life settings. A growing number of cities have been adopting ULLs to co-create and test Nature-Based Solutions (NBS). However, many of these cities have been facing major barriers in trying to adopt the ULL approach for implementing NBS. In this study, we seek to identify these barriers and provide a systemic understanding. Barriers are identified by means of workshops and interviews. Subsequently, interpretive structural modelling serves to identify the interdependencies among the barriers, resulting in a structural model of barriers in adopting ULLs for NBS. Our results show that political and institutional barriers are significantly limiting the adoption of ULLs. Moreover, knowledge brokers and other intermediaries, as well as cross-sectoral collaboration, play a key role in getting ULLs adopted. The findings from this study can help cities to develop strategies that overcome the main barriers for ULL adoption in the context of nature-based solutions.
Highlights
Published: 30 November 2021Nature-based solutions (NBS) are being increasingly adopted by cities in response to climate change as well as to improve urban resilience [1,2]
We aim to identify, explore and analyse the barriers to the adoption of Urban Living Labs (ULLs) for Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) implementation by studying three front-runner cities participating in the UNaLab project: Tampere, Eindhoven and Genoa
Using the Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) method, we provide a systemic understanding in this article to help cities develop more effective strategic plans for addressing the various barriers
Summary
Nature-based solutions (NBS) are being increasingly adopted by cities in response to climate change as well as to improve urban resilience [1,2]. NBS are inspired by, copied from, and/or supported by nature [3] and are implemented to solve or mitigate multiple societal problems [4,5,6]. Cities need to adopt novel approaches for facilitating the interaction between different stakeholders and supporting the development of innovative solutions. Urban Living Labs (ULLs) are being increasingly adopted as a promising approach for developing NBS, especially in many cities across Europe [7,8]. ULLs appear to provide a flexible governance approach that enables experimentation, learning, reflexivity and reversibility in developing and implementing NBS [9]. ULLs are often introduced to orchestrate the collaboration between multiple stakeholders—including companies, research communities, public sector representatives and citizens—by providing a suitable context for co-creation [10]
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