Abstract
Identifying governance schemes that promote cooperation among urban stakeholders is a priority in a context where rapid urbanization poses multiple and complex challenges for ensuring the sustainability of cities. Smart cities offer promising governance approaches, especially in the framework of the concept of Urban Living Labs (ULLs), as an enabling environment for so-called user-centric co-creation processes. While embedding a potential to promote solutions that tackle the challenges of urbanization, especially in relation to the energy transition, it is not yet clear how ULLs can effectively involve all relevant actors nor the extent of their impact, especially regarding behaviors. The study first analyzes the interplay between the challenge of urban energy transition and local governance schemes. Then, it explores how findings from behavioral sciences can inform the design of ULLs to effectively promote active engagement in the urban energy transition. Finally, it reviews the theoretical findings in relation to the ULL that has been taking shape in the city of Trento, Italy.
Highlights
The need for a transition from energy systems that have proved unsustainable from a social, economic, and environmental perspective, to those that can be described being sustainable, is widely recognized (Grubler, 2012)
Despite some positive results in fostering urban sustainability, Urban Living Labs (ULLs) are still faced by some limitations and problems, especially from a behavioral point of view, which approaches those issues at the individual actor level
It needs to be noted that institutional challenges in relation to urban governance and power relations are not necessarily considered, as they are considered a key domain of political economy. The latter puts focus on the wider societal and political context, in which behavior transforms into patterns, slowly translates into rules and institutional structures and again informs behavior (Leroy and Arts, 2006), especially power dynamics will be an important area for further exploration
Summary
The need for a transition from energy systems that have proved unsustainable from a social, economic, and environmental perspective, to those that can be described being sustainable, is widely recognized (Grubler, 2012). Informed Urban Living Labs city approaches have gradually started to call on citizens for the co-design of such solutions (social innovation) (Albino, 2015; Borsekova and Nijkamp, 2018) This is supported by findings on how energy transitions have been historically framed, indicating that changes of energy service demand, linked to societal and environmental transformations, likely play a bigger role than technological innovations in driving transitions (Grubler, 2012). As part of this new interpretation of smart cities, Urban Living Labs (ULLs) have been emerging as a new form of experimental urban governance scheme (Voytenko et al, 2016), which promotes collaboration for a user-centric co-creation process to tackle sustainability challenges.
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