Impacts of urban living lab (ULL) on learning to design inclusive, sustainable, and climate-resilient urban environments

Abstract

Urban design education research increasingly acknowledges the crucial need to create partnerships and collaborations with relevant stakeholders to support urban environments’ planning, governance, design, and decision-making processes in the most holistic manner. However, an inclusive and sustainable urban environment does not have the same meaning for every city, making its design more challenging. The sensory spatial qualities of cities are complex and depend on many social, economic, political, cultural, and natural factors. Thus, this study explores the role of the urban living lab (ULL) methodology in designing inclusive, sustainable, and climate-resilient urban environments in a graduate design studio course. In this study, the ULL was more than a lab. It opened up the critical awareness of multiple links between research, experience, and practice in land use policy. This ULL pedagogical approach could be replicated in different urban contexts to support the decision and design phase of the land use policy process.