Abstract
This paper reflects upon the potential of real-world laboratories (RWLs) to promote sustainable urban development. RWLs strive for knowledge production through collective action in experimental settings. Their implementation in urban studies faces two major challenges: (1) the ambiguity of roles university researchers need to fill, and (2) the variety of expectations among team members from different institutional backgrounds. Based on research in one trans-European and three German RWLs, we propose a stronger focus on team development to help researchers in RWLs address these challenges more systematically. In particular, this means support in terms of resources and infrastructure (time, space, and training). We argue that the improvement of RWL team performance has great impact on the potentials of RWLs in transformative urban studies. Thus, the article contributes to the ongoing debate on the city as a laboratory and site of experimentation in times of multiple crises.
Highlights
Cities have been facing an increasing multitude of social, environmental, and economic crises over the past years
Based on research in four urban real-world laboratories (RWLs) research projects, which we introduce in more detail below, we discuss and illustrate how these two challenges play out and potentially put re-search processes aiming at urban transformation at risk
Against the background of several typical situations where this has come to the fore in our RWLs, we argue that transdisciplinary teams in general and urban RWL teams in particular need to devote more resources to team development processes and to guide ‘unsettled’ transdisciplinary teams through cyclical RWL processes
Summary
At the interface of transformative and transdisciplinary research, RWLs aim at producing socially robust knowledge, i.e., they integrate knowledge from various scientific and societal sources (Nowotny et al 2011). 10), transdisciplinary RWLs strive for systematic, target and transformative knowledge through the codesign and co-production of knowledge (see an ideal–typical process model in Fig. 1); they are participatory and include permanent self-reflection and learning processes To some degree, they take up 1960s/70s action research, which emerged from a critique of positivism and considered social science as normative, political, and potentially emancipatory. RWLs members come from universities and other research institutions, public (planning) administration, local business associations or civil society; they may or may not have an academic background, and their motivation to do research in a particular project may be very different from academic researchers This entails (at least) two major challenges for RWL-based research: ambiguous roles for researchers beyond their traditional role of reflective scientist, and different expectations among team members in terms of cooperation and RWL results. We will explicate the state of re-search with regard to these challenges
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