Abstract
Environmental sustainability is an increasingly relevant aspect of urban living labs. The objective of this study is to examine an urban living lab through ecosystem approach lenses and reveal the actor activities and diverse flows between them, enabling sustainable urban development. The study examines an urban area through four living lab projects in the Hiedanranta district in Tampere in Finland. We apply a qualitative research design strategy including semi-structured interviews reinforced with the project reports and websites. The collaboration and co-creation nature of living labs resembles an ecosystem structure, as both include diverse complementary actors and have distinctive coordination mechanisms, shared goals, and system-level outcomes. Building on the ecosystem analogy and circular economy ecosystem typology, our study examines living labs as ecosystems, enabling the economic value flow, material flow, and knowledge flow and pursuing the shared goal of improved environmental sustainability. The findings of the study demonstrate how the different ecosystem types manifest in urban living labs, and the actors, flows, and outcomes in these ecosystems. The study concludes that urban sustainability-oriented living labs comprise all main types of circular economy ecosystems. The dominant type of the activities (biased to economic value, material, or knowledge) determines the ecosystem type in an urban living lab, highlighting a key topic for future research: The contribution of collaborative projects to environmental sustainability in urban living labs realized through diverse ecosystem types.
Highlights
Introduction published maps and institutional affilThe interest in and significance of environmental sustainability has been growing globally due to the increased awareness of the effects of climate change on natural habitats [1]
We argue that an urban living lab for environmental sustainability and circular economy can be considered as a multi-actor ecosystem: The ecosystem conceptualization has been applied increasingly during the last decade [16] to refer to diverse complex multi-actor settings
We generate a new understanding on urban living labs as we study how they function as a circular economy ecosystem: Collaborations in urban living labs, often actualized via projects, create an ecosystem in which the actors work towards the particular goal of the ecosystem
Summary
Urban living labs comprise various actors that take part in the practice-based innovation activities in an urban area, tackling varying urban challenges. These actors are categorized mainly as municipalities, companies, research institutes, and residents [11]. The enabling characteristics of municipalities indicate the supportive nature of the public sector actors and their role in creating a vision and spreading and communicating the vision to other actors in the urban living lab. This “enables” the emergence of innovations for urban challenges. Each actor type is introduced with specific roles, these roles might change over time as they are context-specific and depend on the innovation network’s needs and goals [10,24]
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