DEGREE PROJECT IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT, SECOND CYCLE, 30 CREDITS STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN 2020
Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation
The case of Urban Living Labs: Insights from the Swedish Context
SPILIOS ILIOPOULOS
KTH ROYAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT www.kth.se Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation. The case of Urban Living Labs: Insights from the Swedish Context
Spilios Iliopoulos
AG212XVT201 Degree Project in Urban and Regional Planning, Second Cycle KTH Royal Institute of Technology Supervisor: Maria Håkansson Examiner: Tigran Haas Stockholm, May 2020
Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Acknowledgements
The present study would not have reached its final outcome without the contribution of certain individuals. First I would like to thank my supervisor at KTH, Maria Håkansson for her aid and support throughout the process of the project. During our regular meetings her fruitful comments and remarks influenced my work on a great degree. I would to also like to thank Lucas Smas, Kes Mccormick, Andrew Karvonen, Jonas Bylund and Anja Karlsson for taking part in the interviews organized as part of the methodological process as well as all the people who assisted me in forwarding the survey that was conducted. Finally I would like to place special thanks to Michaela for bearing with me and supporting me throughout this difficult period that we all went through. We will emerge stronger.
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Table of Contents
List of Tables ...... 5 List of Figures ...... 6 1. Introduction ...... 8 1.1. Preface ...... 8 1.2. Aim and Research Questions ...... 9 1.3. Delimitations of the current study ...... 10 1.4. Relevance within the field of Urban and Regional Planning ...... 11 1.5. Overview of Chapters ...... 12 2. Research Methodology ...... 13 2.1. Origins and the main cornerstones of the project ...... 13 2.2. The employment of Interviews ...... 14 2.3. The methodological challenges that emerged and the use of online surveys ...... 15 3. Background ...... 17 3.1. Theoretical framework ...... 17 3.1.1. Sustainability Transition Theories ...... 17 3.1.2. The nature of experimentation ...... 20 3.1.3. The communicative turn in planning-collaborative planning ...... 23 3.2. From Urban Labs to Living Labs and Urban Living Labs- Unraveling a “messy” concept ...... 24 3.3. Typologies of Urban Living Labs ...... 31 3.4. The relevance of Urban Living Labs in the Swedish planning context ...... 34 4. Exploring the transformative capacity of Urban Living Labs in the Swedish context ...... 36 4.1. The five case studies ...... 36 4.1.1. A synthesis of two case studies: The ‘Mobile in Vienna-Liesing’ and “Experiment Stockholm”...... 37 4.1.2. The SubUrbanLab Project: “Social Uplifting and Modernization of Suburban Areas with an Urban Living Lab Approach”-The case of “New Light in Alby Hill” and “Shape your world” ...... 40 4.1.3. Malmo Innovation Platform ...... 43 4.1.4. Hållbarheten (Western Harbor, Malmö) ...... 44 4.1.5. An analysis of the five case studies ...... 45 4.2. The limits of Urban Living Labs- Difficulties, drawbacks and risks in their implementation ..... 53 5. Urban Living Labs and the role of local administrations and planners ...... 56 5.1. Urban Living Labs and the local administration ...... 56
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
5.2. The role of the planner in Urban Living Labs ...... 59 5.2.1. Planners as facilitators and enablers of Urban Living Labs ...... 59 5.2.2. Planners as advisors-consultants ...... 61 5.2.3. Planners as storytellers ...... 62 6. The role of citizens in Urban Living Labs ...... 64 6.1. Civic participation in Urban Living Labs and Arnstein’s “Ladder” ...... 65 6.2. The results of the surveys on citizen participation in the context of urban experimentation .. 67 7. Overall discussion and concluding remarks ...... 77 7.1. Discussion on the main findings ...... 77 7.1.1. Urban Living Labs and the Swedish reality: The importance of practice exchange ...... 77 7.1.2. Implications for urban governance ...... 80 7.1.3. Discussing the role of citizens ...... 81 7.1.4. The role of planning professionals ...... 82 7.2. Directives for future research on urban experimentation and Urban Living Labs ...... 83 7.2.1. Emerging themes in the Urban Living Lab research ...... 83 7.2.2. Suggestions for methodological pathways in Urban Living Lab-urban experimentation research 85 7.3. The future of Urban Living Labs-some concluding remarks ...... 87 References ...... 90 Appendix ...... 103 Appendix 1: Interview with professionals ...... 103 Appendix 2: Online Surveys ...... 108
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
List of Tables
Table 1: Drivers of Living Labs ...... 27 Table 2: Classification of Urban Living Labs according to the product or service that is produced ...... 32 Table 3: Actor-user oriented classification of Urban Living Labs according to their scale...... 32 Table 4: Urban Living Labs’ Innovation Typologies ...... 33 Table 5: Themes that emerged during the project ...... 39 Table 6: the Urban Living Labs of the SubUrbanLab project ...... 41 Table 7: Typologies of the five case studies of ULLs ...... 47 Table 8: Indicators/strategies of ULLs diffusion processes and the five ULLs case studies ...... 48 Table 9: The five cases of ULLs and the area(s) of sustainability they relate to ...... 50
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
List of Figures
Figure 1: The phases of transition ...... 18 Figure 2: Linking Transition and niche experimentation. The demonstration of a non-linear process...... 22 Figure 3: Different types of Urban Labs ...... 25 Figure 4: Fundamental Processes of Living Labs, also applicable in Urban Living Lab methodologies ...... 26 Figure 5: Urban Living Labs situated in the Quintuple Helix Model...... 29 Figure 6: The process of “translation”. The adaptation of a local experiment to a different local context. 30 Figure 7: The process of “scaling-up” from a single “niche” experiment ...... 31 Figure 8: Workshop activities during the “Experiment Stockholm” Project ...... 39 Figure 9: Art installations and LED technology in “New light in Alby project”, ...... 43 Figure 10: The “smart home” in Western Harbor, Malmö, ...... 45 Figure 11: Graph visualization approach to the diffusion processes of Urban living Labs ...... 53 Figure 12: The local administration as part of the public sector section of the quintuple helix model ...... 58 Figure 13: The quintuple helix and the position of industry...... 61 Figure 14: Citizens are positioned within the “civic society ellipse” in the model of the quintuple helix. ... 65 Figure 15: Arnstein’s model of the “Ladder of Citizen Participation ...... 66 Figure 16: The networks of the “CASUAL”, “SbUrbanLab” and the “GUST” projects ...... 79 Figure 17: A future image of interconnectedness of urban experiments between local experimental practices in Sweden ...... 79 Figure 18: The medieval storyteller and the modern-day urban planner ...... 82 Figure 19: Images of the future- The experimental city...... 89
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Abstract
Urban Living Labs emerged in the past decade as spatially embedded multi-stakeholder integrating forms of urban experimentation. They pose as key-nodes for transforming urban governance and generating new, innovative responses to pressing wicked planning and sustainability issues for cities in transition. In Sweden various such projects have been initiated in various locales as parts of European projects that connect different locales. The present Degree Project seeks to examine mechanisms through which Urban Living Labs seek the transformation of established structures towards a more sustainable future in the Swedish context. It does so by analyzing five such projects that have been established in different urban areas in Sweden. In this process it also examines the roles of main actors who play a prominent role in the framework of this form of urban experimentation. This is succeeded through employing a mixed-method approach as a response to the above questions. The main findings point towards the need for extensive networking and exchange of practices between different locales within Sweden and highlight the potentials of urban experimentation for the transformation of the role of main actors. The present Degree Project concludes by reflecting on the future of Urban Living Labs and urban experimentation.
Titel på svenska: En undersökning av den transformativa kapaciteten hos urbana experiment: Lärdomar från Urban Living Labs i svensk kontext
”Urban Living Labs” dök upp under det senaste decenniet som rumsligt inbäddade flerintressenter som integrerade former av urban experiment. De utgör som nyckelnoder för att omvandla stadsstyrning och generera nya, innovativa svar på pressande onda planering och hållbarhetsfrågor för städer i övergång. I Sverige har olika sådana projekt initierats på olika platser som delar av europeiska projekt som förbinder olika platser. Föreliggande examensprojekt syftar till att undersöka mekanismer genom vilka Urban Living Labs söker omvandling av etablerade strukturer till en mer hållbar framtid i svensk kontext. Det gör det genom att analysera fem sådana projekt som har etablerats i olika stadsområden i Sverige. I denna process undersöker den också rollerna för huvudaktörer som spelar en framträdande roll inom ramen för denna form av urban experiment. Detta lyckas genom att använda en metod med blandad metod som svar på ovanstående frågor. De viktigaste slutsatserna pekar på behovet av omfattande nätverkssamarbete och utbyte av praxis mellan olika orter i Sverige och belyser potentialerna i stadsförsök för omvandlingen av huvudaktörernas roll. Det aktuella examensprojektet avslutas med att reflektera över framtidens Urban Living Labs och urban experiment.
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
1. Introduction
As of 2018 in Europe, 74% of the population lives in urban areas and the tendency demonstrates that this percentage is on the rise, reaching 83.7% in 2050 (European Commission, 2019). Increased urbanization brings forward increasing challenges for cities and a pressing need to adapt to shifting regimes that make them less resilient to modern-day sustainability concerns. Climate change and its impacts on cities’ infrastructure, social inequality, shifting demographics due to immigration as well as unexpected occurrences such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, continuously prove how vulnerable our cities are and how difficult it is to respond and adapt to change especially when it is unforeseen. Urban planning plays and will continue to do so, a major role in underpinning many of the problems generated by shifting socioeconomic and environmental conditions.
1.1. Preface
The nature of urban planning problems can be considered as “wicked”. This is how Rittel and Webber (1973) refer to complex urban planning issues that bare no fixed solution or a clear pathway to coming up with one. Wicked planning problems present complex challenges with no unique solutions, since they are problems unique in their nature. One can argue that today’s sustainability issues can be seen as wicked problems that contemporary societies are called upon to address in the context of rapidly shifting environmental, demographic and economical conditions. Wicked planning problems are also connected with uncertainty and the element of surprise. One of the main reasons why planning problems become wicked problems is that they have no universal solution. Various actors are affected in different ways by a spatially manifested problem and at the same time, they bare varying perspectives on how these problems can be solved. For some actors, another actor’s problem presents no sufficient issue short-term but could become a greater burden in the long-run. Sustainable Development Goal number 11 (“Make human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”), and more specifically sub-target 11.3, calls for a more inclusive and sustainable urbanization, placing specific emphasis on the need to promote a participatory approach to planning and managing human settlements (Sustainable Development Goals, 2019). Thereby lays the notion that a multi-actor perspective needs to be adopted in order to address complex spatially manifested issues. Urban governance plays a critical role in establishing this multi-actor perspective through schemes of urban actors’ collaboration that propose a departure from a “business-as-usual” pathway for addressing complex issues. One such way of adopting these schemes is by establishing what can be considered an
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
umbrella term for urban actors’ collaboration initiatives, the concept of Urban Living Labs. Rittel and Weber (1973) emphasize that planners “do not have the right to be wrong”. Urban experiments performed under certain conditions acting as “test-beds” offer the opportunity to actually be wrong and learn from this or to discover new pathways of practicing urban planning and urban governance in the context of creating the preconditions for significant change or transformation. Therefore the present study looks into a specific form of urban experiments through examining the concept of Urban Living Labs and the mechanisms through which they have the capacity to transform existing structures and modes of urban planning and governance as well as the role of the main actors that shape them and are shaped through them. Urban Living Labs can be placed within the context of urban experimentation not only etymologically but ontologically, as they are positioned as test-beds of formalized knowledge facilitation (Marvin et.al, 2018). The learning generated from Urban Living Labs as will be demonstrated later in chapter 3, is not delimitated to technological implications but exceeds to various fields of knowledge, including social innovation (Steenbergen & Frantzeskaki, 2018), thus having a wide application. They are particularly employed to address issues relating to sustainability concerns (Voytenko, 2016 ; von Wirth, 2019 ; Chroneer, 2019; Evans & Karvonen, 2011 ; Bulekley et.al, 2018). Sweden, as part of the European Union has adopted the European Commission’s climate action strategy through the “European Green Deal” setting environmental targets for 2030 and 2050. At the same time, Sweden has uptaken various other common strategies introduced by the European Commission. In the face of common strategies introduced for member states, Urban Living Labs have been promoted by the European Commission as tools for the integration of sustainability targets and the improvement of the urban conditions in European cities, under the framework of Living Labs and open innovation for the creation of user-centric products (European Commission, 2016; 2017). Urban Living Labs have been promoted and established through platform organizations such as the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) and JPI Urban Europe. Sweden is part of these innovation networks generated through various projects that have been implemented in communities around the country mostly during the past decade.
1.2. Aim and Research Questions
The aim of the present study is to explore the underlying mechanisms that aid to the understanding of the transformative capacity of experimentation in the urban context and to analyze the role of central actors that are integrated in the concept of Urban Living Labs. This study focuses on the Swedish context, and ULLs are approached from an urban governance point of view, emphasizing the
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
local municipal context and the potentials for their transitional, normative oriented implementation. It does so by focusing on the investigation of case studies of Urban Living Labs in Sweden and on the role of three main actors of Urban Living Labs in this transitional environment: (i) citizens (ii) municipalities (iii) planners. The main aims of the project can be reflected through the following two research questions. The research questions also correspond to the theoretical framework that is developed in section 3.1.
R.Q. 1: “How is the transformative capacity of Urban Living Labs expressed in the Swedish urban governance context?” The exploratory nature of this research question corresponds to the author’s need to further understand the underlying mechanisms that enhance transformative change in the context of sustainability transitions framework through Urban Living Labs that have been implemented in Sweden. R.Q. 2: “What is the role of citizens, local administrations and planners in an Urban Living Lab environment?” The second research question of this study can be labeled as a mix of exploratory and descriptive in its nature. It seeks both to provide with a clearer understanding of the existing condition of actors’ roles, but at the same time there is an attempt to explore potential alternative directives these roles can take and depart from a conventional mode of practices.
1.3. Delimitations of the current study
In the present study, the Swedish reality is discussed mostly as a response to the first research question, concerning the transformative potentials of Urban Living Labs. The second research question departs from a narrowed-down perspective and attempts an overview of the main actors’ roles drawing insights from both the Swedish context and from beyond , through literature insights mostly from the European perspective on the subject. Regarding the second research question and the role of the citizens in Urban Living Labs, it should be recognized that it is not wise to over generalize from a study focused on one locale in Sweden, in this case the municipality of Norrtälje. However the aim of the second study was to draw conclusion from other areas as well and create a more spherical perspective on the trends regarding citizen participation in an environment that could resemble an Urban Living Lab. It should be realized though that the choice of Norrtälje as a locale of focus might not precisely reflect the entire Swedish reality. Moreover, the methods employed to acquire and analyze data were mostly used to answer the first research question and parts of the second. A more theoretical approach was used to respond to parts of
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
the second research question and more specifically to the role of planners and that of municipalities. The reasons for this will be analyzed further in chapter 2. The present study gives prominent emphasis on the investigation of existing identified mechanisms that generate the capacity of Urban Living Labs to initiate greater structural transformations in the field of urban governance. What is not sought in the present study is an analytical discussion of the funding mechanisms behind Urban Living Labs, although their importance is recognized. It should be also stated that although the quintuple helix model is employed to discuss the role of important actors in the context of Urban Living Labs, some important roles of actors are not discussed extensively in the present study, such as in the case of the important part that knowledge institutes such as Universities play in the generation of innovation through urban experimentation. In addition to this the present study does not focus on urban experimentation that engages SMEs in innovation projects such as those funded by Vinnova or Tillväxtverket. Finally, it must be recognized that the present study is framed by employing a theoretical framework that attempts to encompass the main points and angles investigated and discussed throughout the study. However, this framework could have been enriched or approached in a different way for example by also discussing theories on networks and actors in networks.
1.4. Relevance within the field of Urban and Regional Planning
The current Master Thesis is conducted in the specialization field of Urban and Regional Planning of the Sustainable Urban Planning and Design Master Program at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. This means that the current project approaches planning as a multidisciplinary and integrated activity that responds to the three pillars of Sustainable Development that refer to the environmental, social and economic aspects of urban and regional development in a challenging era of “wicked” problems. The topic under study concerns an interdisciplinary and inclusive approach to urban development and examines the preconditions for structural changes (transformation) in modes of urban governance with the aim of creating improved conditions for the urban environment. It does so by placing urban experimentation through inclusive modes of urban development as a central concept of the transition to a more sustainable urban environment, balancing environmental, economic and social factors. Urban Living Labs are studied as an integrating tool for urban governance within and between the local governance level.
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
1.5. Overview of Chapters
This first chapter of the present study acts as an introductory section entailing the general background for the study, the aim and the research question it focuses as well as the limitations for the study and its relevance with the field of Urban and Regional Planning to which it responds to as a Degree Project. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the chosen methods used to gather and analyze data, responding to the research questions presented in chapter 1. Chapter 3 begins by forming a more general theoretical background that will be used throughout the study as a framework of analysis for the topic of Urban Living Labs. Then, the more specific background of Urban Living Labs is presented also in relation to the main literature connected to the topic as well as the concept’s relevance with the Swedish planning context. Chapter 4 connects the topic of the study to the Swedish context and attempts to respond to the first research question through a case study analysis, drawing insight from the interviews with professionals engaged with the concept of Urban Living Labs. Chapter 5 and 6 are engaged with the response to the second research question on the role of the main actors discussed in the present study. Chapter 5 is devoted to analyzing and reflecting on the role of municipalities and professional planners, while chapter 6 is solely engaged with the role of citizens1 in Urban Living Labs. This distinction between chapter 5 and chapter six is mostly based on the different methodological approach to the two chapters. While chapter 5 follows a more theoretical approach, chapter six is partly based on the surveys conducted. Finally, chapter 7 discusses the findings from the previous chapters and aims to broadening the discussion by introducing ideas on further research on the topic of the study.
1 At this point, a main clarification should be made regarding citizen participation in general. One should remain cautious when using this exact term (“citizens”). In one way this formulation of the term could potentially exclude all types of inhabitants within a community (Jonas Bylund, personal communication, 2020). The shifting demographics after a decade of refugee and immigration crisis have created a new large group of people who are not formally citizens. The continuously unstable situation in various areas of the planet, as well as the implications of the future climate-change impacts in vulnerable regions might enlarge this categorization of “informal citizens” in various countries including Sweden. However these people are still inhabitants of a community and affected by the same issues that formal citizens are. Thus, when discussing about inclusivity and the integration of different perspectives “informal citizens’” perspectives should also be taken into account. This relates back to the SDG 11 and the goal of “leaving no one behind”. For the sake of the current study it should be clarified that the term “citizen participation” is used in an inclusive manner, not excluding such categories of inhabitants.
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
2. Research Methodology
The present study can be framed alike the nature of the research questions posed, as an exploratory study. It follows a mixed method approach to the topic of as both qualitative and quantitative research methods where employed to acquire a better understanding of the topic and the emerging conditions in the Swedish context. Two priorities were set initially: (i) Gaining a better perspective on the concept of Urban Living Labs itself in the light of sustainability transitions and (ii) understanding the concept in the Swedish reality and in the light of the Swedish planning context. The latter is the main reason why part of the study should be performed in the real-life context of the local Swedish governance reality, resembling principles of a qualitative study (Groat and Wang, 2013). This was the original methodology process that was to be followed for this project and will be discussed more thoroughly below. These two priorities described above intended to reflect the main methodological components of this project.
2.1. Origins and the main cornerstones of the project
The foundations for this project can be traced back to the autumn semester of 2019 and the course: “AG2129 HT19-1 Project Sustainable Urban Planning - Strategies for Urban and Regional Development”. During the course project there was the chance to engage in discussions with the planners of Norrtälje municipality (Kommun) in the north of Stockholm around issues of local sustainability and the participation of residents the local communities in urban development processes. Especially the discussions with Anna Bolinder, an urban planner of Norrtälje municipality on the need for the generation of new channels of communication between the municipality and the residents, provided the basis for what was to evolve as the present thesis project. It was also the reason why residents of Norrtälje were approached to become part of the project’s methodology as will be described below. In order to gain a better perspective on the transformative potentials of Urban Living Labs, the first step was to decide on five case studies of projects that resemble the structure and methodology of Urban Living Labs that have been implemented in Sweden, that reflect fundamental transitional aspects suggested by the framework employed by Timo von Wirth, Lea Fuenfschilling, Niki Frantzeskaki & Lars Coenen (2019). Case studies as a methodological tool are useful in exploratory studies such as the present. Robert Stake from a constructivist-interpretivist point of view, understands case study as a methodology that attempts to study the “particularity and complexity” of a single case in the context of wider related conditions (Stake, 1995, p. 11). Several other frameworks for assessing Urban Living Lab typologies were drawn from the existing literature on Urban Living Labs. The five case studies were
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
decided upon through extensive literature reading and through interviews conducted with five professionals that have engaged with the topic of Urban Living Labs.
2.2. The employment of Interviews
To the core of the methodology lies the concept of interviews. Semi- Structured interviews were performed with professionals; researchers and practitioners who are or were engaged actively with urban experimentation and the concept of Urban Living Labs, but in different ways and in different locales in Sweden. These interviewees presented in chronological order of the conducted interviews were:
Lucas Smas, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography with a focus on Urban and Regional Planning Andrew Karvonen, Associate Professor and Director of Doctoral Studies in the Division of Urban and Regional Studies at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Kes Mccormick, Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor in the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics, Lund University. Jonas Bylund, member of the JPI Urban Europe Management Board. Anja Karlsson, Environmental Strategist at Solna municipality.
Semi-structured interviews as part of a qualitative research are usually performed when a researcher aims to uncover an ontological position that is connected to peoples’ understandings, experiences and their interaction with other people and situations (Mason, 2011 ; Groat & Wang, 2013). Although the interview questions varied from respondent to respondent, most questions were formulated prior to the interview events, while some questions changed during the interview in order to adapt to the ongoing discussion. All the interviews contained certain areas to be covered, however the approach to each area of interest varied in relation to the person who was being interviewed and their relation to the topic of interest. It should be mentioned that some interviews that were planned to be “face-to-face” were no longer possible to be conducted in this manner due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications for the practice of social distancing as a community-protective measure. There were multiple reasons why interviews were chosen as a constructive method to be implemented in the beginning as well as during the process of the project. Semi-structured interviews focus on the experiences of an individual and their interpretation of a phenomenon and thus, in a study such as the present, this method should be accompanied by other in order to obtain a more spherical view on the topic. It also proved to be a useful tool in unraveling the basic components and ideas behind the concept of Urban Living Labs, as the un-unified literature on the topic has the ability to generate an
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
initial sense of confusion. At the same time the interviews presented with another opportunity. As professionals were interviewed, each one told a story. And every story related to a real-life context were living lab methodologies were implemented. This process led to establishment of the analysis of case studies as an essential part of the project analysis regarding the transformative capacity of Urban Living Labs and the response to the first research question. The above interviews were conducted either “face- to-face” or online, using the “Zoom” online conference platform.
2.3. The methodological challenges that emerged and the use of online surveys
But the importance of this method was not only connected to the response to the first research question. Since this project is approaching the topic of Urban Living Labs from a three-dimensional perspective as phrased in the second research question, all three main actors should be approached. The original idea was that semi-structured interviews would also be performed with key-informants from the Municipality of Norrtälje, politicians and urban planners in March and April of 2020, as well as a workshop or focus group session in mid-March, as an attempt to make observations by conducting an experiment and involving different municipal and community actors to engage in dialogue for a specific sustainability issue in relation to the municipality of Norrtälje. However, as circumstances changed rapidly due to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the lack of replies from planners in Norrtälje municipality, this option was no longer possible. As a result the methodology had to be re-adapted. Instead of the original plan, the second research question, especially the part that regards the role of municipalities and planners is answered through more theoretical means and by using the feedback gained from the interviews previously performed with professionals engaging with Urban Living Labs and through extensive desktop study and reflection from the main outcomes of the case study analysis. In order to gain a perspective of the citizens’ role in an Urban Living Lab environment a different methodological procedure was followed. Two online surveys were performed in February and March 2020. The first one reached out to Norrtälje’s residents’ groups on “Facebook”, as a means to attract more respondents residing in the specific locale. Emails were also used to forward the survey. The second survey attempted to reach out to residents from more Swedish municipalities. The online surveys were client-side oriented, since they were executed in the respondent’s online environment (Lewis-Beck et.al, 2004). The surveys were performed using the Google Survey form included in the Google Drive office suite and included questions relating to the topic of “’Urban Governance and Participation in Norrtälje Municipality”. The aim of the survey under the title “Enkätstudie: Deltagande och stadsutveckling i
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Norrtälje kommun” 2was to uncover the degrees of participation in Norrtälje municipality and at the same time create an image of the potential role of the citizens in an Urban Living Lab environment as well as their attitude towards an experimental approach to spatial interventions in their local communities. It should be acknowledge that a major drawback when conducting these kinds of researches relates to the issue of representation within the sample. Moreover, the lack of a large number of responses; 47 from the questionnaire for the residents of Norrtälje and 30 from the questionnaire outside the local context, limits the validity of the survey and the potential to draw even more general conclusions from it. The paradox of receiving more answers through the Norrtälje pilot than the one reaching out to various locales (although additional promotional efforts were used in the second one) can have an explanation that relates to the fact that in the first case, the people who responded to the survey have strong ties to the specific locale that came under study and can relate to the title of the survey. An assumption can be drawn that the more generalized sample did not feel connected to the topic of the pilot since it did not directly concern or name their locale of residence. However, this assumption will be analyzed further in chapter 6 of the project. The mere use of technological means and social media as the basis for this survey might enhance bias and also implies a difficulty of controlling the sample (Lewis-Beck et.al, 2004). A realization must be made though, that a face to face handing of the questionnaire related to the survey was not possible due to the unique circumstances regarding the pandemic. It must be stated at this point that the purpose of the two surveys that were sent out was not to compare the results. These two surveys are linked to different samples and a different spatial scale of reference, and as a result a mere comparison of the results would be problematic. Instead, the aim was to examine and compare trends that are demonstrated through the answers of individuals and point out potentially interesting findings. Such an aim centered on the use of surveys entails the risk of failing its original aim, however in the case of the present project; this direction was partly justified as will be demonstrated.
2 Survey on Urban Governance and Participation in Norrtälje Municipality
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
3. Background
Chapter 3 consists of three main parts. The first one is set to analyze the theoretical connotations and establishes a framework for the discussion on Urban Living Labs. The second part of the chapter explores the nature of Urban Living Labs in relation to their emergence and main characteristics, while the third part emphasizes on the main identified typologies of Urban Living Labs.
3.1. Theoretical framework
Three main theoretical concepts are employed for this task of framing the topic of study, the sustainability transition concept, experimentation as well as theories of urban governance relating to the communicative turn in planning. These distinct three main theoretical components of the current study are recognized as interrelated under the framework of Urban Living Labs.
3.1.1. Sustainability Transition Theories
Human societies in the dawn of the 21st century are faced with unprecedented challenges that are linked with environmental, social and economical issues that are in many cases not interdependent from each other. These are referred to as sustainability issues and the discourse around them has become more prominent than ever in the past two decades. Environmental challenges and threats related to climate change, societal transformations and reshaping related to issues such as growing immigration and the imminent danger of another economic meltdown such as the crisis of 2008 that generated global shockwaves indicate the need for another path than the business-as-usual trajectory. The question that arises and does not have an easy answer to is: can human societies transition towards a more sustainable future? If so how can this be achieved beyond path-dependencies? In the need of the above trajectory, a relatively new field of research has emerged in the last two decades that of transition studies and sustainability transition research. More specifically, in the early 1990s, the transitions research field emerged from two main intellectual currents, the one mainly revolving around the Science and Technology studies (STS) and the second one being an overlap of environmental, sustainability studies, and policy and governance linked with the latter two (Loorbach et.al, 2017). When attempting to define sustainability transitions, one can see that definitions are biased and sometimes closer to one of the two main epistemological currents from where the field emerged from. Sustainability transitions could be defined as transformation processes related to a long-term
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
temporal scale and a multidimensional perspective, from which socio-technical systems evolve towards a more sustainable production and consumption scheme (Markard et. al, 2012). The above definition bares a more technical and narrowed-down approach, relating to the field of Science and Technology Studies. Loorbach et.al (2017) on the other hand propose a definition that is closer to the current of environmental and sustainability studies. They suggest that sustainability transitions relate to various fields and sectors, such as water management, health care, education, but also the transition of regions and communities towards a more sustainable regime and how societies can adapt to the challenges of the future in relation to sustainable development. In other words, transition can be considered a process of a complex system moving from an undesirable less sustainable state to a more sustainable one. Transitions occur in phases as seen in Figure 1 and these are the predevelopment phase, the “take-off” phase, the acceleration phase and the stabilization phase (Ehnert et. al, 2018). It is important to note at this point, that “transition” itself is not a synonym to “transformation”, although both are used as interrelated normative concepts to refer to change in complex adaptive systems (Hölscher et al, 2018). However they are interrelated and interdependent. Transition can; however does not necessarily lead to a transformation of current established structures of a system. At the same time transition requires transformation. Transformation can be the result of several transitions and thus can be framed within the concept of sustainability transitions as an outcome rather than a process (Andrew Karvonen, personal communication, 2020). Transformation is also linked with a larger scale that undergoes change, while transitions regard societal sub-systems (Hölscher et al, 2018). As one can observe, transformation requires a transition period (or a series of transitions). At the same time however, a transition itself might pre-require the transformation of certain structures.
Figure 1: The phases of transition, Source: Binder et.al (2017)
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
At this point, one can identify a strong connection between sustainability transitions and socio- ecological resilience. Resilience according to Folke (2006) refers to the ability of systems both to absorb shocks but also to re-organize. Folke considers the ability of systems to re-organize after a disturbance crucial for sustainability. For Holling (1973), the pioneer in resilience studies as well as Folke and many scholars working with resilience (Tanner et. al, 2009; Boyd et.al, 2015; Walker et. al, 2004), social- ecological systems are of the outmost importance to sustainability discourses. Berkes and Folke (1998) use the term socio-ecological systems to emphasize the interrelation between human societies and nature through cross-scale interactions that lead to what they refer to as regime-shifts, the crossing between one state of sustainability to another. For Markard et. al (2012), governance is of key importance to this shift of regimes between a less and a more sustainable way of dealing with challenges related to socio-technical systems. Loorbach et. al (2017) also emphasize the importance of governance by highlighting that transition studies as a research interact both with policy and the society, with governance being a primary aspect of the transitioning path towards more sustainable regimes. They define three approaches to transition studies, the socio-technical approach, the socio-ecological approach and the socio- institutional approach. For the sake of the current topic more emphasis will be given on the latter, the socio-institutional approach, as it refers to how path dependencies are challenged by means of social innovation. Through this approach, focus is placed on the role of governance, issues of power and politics. The politics of transition studies have also been extensively discussed by Avelino, Grin, Pel and Jhagroe (2016). Smith and Stirling (2010), from a different perhaps angle discuss the interrelation between socio- ecological and socio-technical systems in the face of resilience of the systems, highlighting the importance of governance in what they refer to as “transitions management”. Transitions management is related to the concept of adaptive governance, a term that is again related with resilience of systems, placing emphasis on multilevel governance and its social, institutional, economical and ecological foundations for addressing the challenges related to the interplay between sustainability issues and systems (Stockholm Resilience Center, 2015). Adaptive governance is thus inevitably linked with innovation processes. At this point an important concept is introduced that underplays a major role in sustainability transition studies and will be of great relevance for introducing a further framework of relevance for the discussed topic. The “niches” play a key role in sustainability transition studies as protected spaces and processes (Markard et.al, 2011) where innovation can take place without altering the function of the greater regime. At this point it should be clarified that the concept of regimes differs between resilience studies and sustainability transitions studies. Here it is used as a reference to societal regimes, as “dominant and stable configuration” (Loorbach et. al, 2017, p.605). In other words, in resilience studies, regimes refer to a state of being, while in sustainability transitions, they usually bear a spatial or
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geographical significance and embededdness. To clarify through an example, in resilience studies, a social- ecological system can enter a state of disruption, an unsustainable regime, while in transition studies regimes enter states of disruptions due to the inability to escape a path dependency and optimization phase. Niches can thus be seen as spaces of experimentation for innovation, safe spaces that offer the chance to test innovation for sustainability and the resilience of socio-ecological systems through socio- technical practices with the goal of a systemic regime change and the departing from this disruptive optimization state that was previously mentioned (Bui et. al, 2016).
3.1.2. The nature of experimentation
As one can observe, a central concept of transition studies is experimentation (Markard et.al, 2011 ; Sengers et. al, 2016). There have been several approaches to defining scientific experiments and most are related to the physical sciences, however, as pointed out by Frances Hall Rousmaniere (1906), it is not strictly restricted to that field. He goes on to highlight that experimentation is highly connected to observation. Karl Dieter-Opp (1970) describes the nature of experimentations in social sciences by introducing the notion of variables and manipulation. He states that there are two cases when an experiment is conducted. The first one occurs when a researcher manipulates all the variables the effects of which they seek to uncover, and those are the independent variables, or in the second case if none are manipulated. In the latter case one refers to a natural experiment, and when it occurs researchers try to minimize the effect of other external variables. This definition brings forth an important key-feature of experiments. They can occur in protected environments in order to test specific outcomes. The next step is to define those protected environments where experiments occur. For Science and Technology studies, experimentation is a core concept especially through a perspective that emerged in the 1970s, the “laboratory studies” (Cettina, 1995). Laboratory studies move away from the traditional understanding of the methodology of experimentation, by broadening the scope of activities related to the production of knowledge. For Karvonen and Evans (2010), the word “Laboratory” is connected to an epistemology as in a way to understand the world. In 1979, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar conducted an ethnographic approach to understand not only how knowledge is produced within a laboratory but at the same time to analyze the laboratory as a system itself. Through their work laboratories are portrayed as systems of “literary inscription” (Latour & Woolgar, 1979, p. 105), drawing from a social constructivist perspective (Sismondo, 1993). This system classification refers to the production of written knowledge which is obtained and constructed though various means. In laboratory studies, the aim is to observe the degree of agreement between those processes of literary inscription
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and facts (Lenoir, 1998) but also to observe how the space of the laboratory is connected with the society through the knowledge produced. In other words how new knowledge is communicated back and forth from the source to the recipient and the feedback from this communication (Karvonen & van Heur, 2013). Karvonen and van Heur (2013, p. 383) extract a triple understanding of experimentation as it emerges through laboratory studies. According to their interpretation, experimentation involves a “specific set-up of instrument and people”, aims at inducing change in a controlled environment and assesses the potential results from those changes that are tested. This approach to experimentation encompasses three main attributes of experimental processes. They use specific means to test conditions and actors, as in physical presences who take part in those experiments and/or lead an experiment and coordinate efforts. What is more they should always have a clear aim and scope and there should always be a reflection on the results of the experimental process and the creation of new knowledge in the form of feedbacks that emerge from those results. Moving the notion of experimentation to the urban studies context, experimentation has the ability to generate new concepts and knowledge within a situated place which is the laboratory (Karvonen and van Heur 2014). Urban experiments have been discussed since the 1960s, when Athelstan Spilhaus wrote the essay “The Experimental City” to reflect a transitioning environment in the US context and worked with the Minnesota Experimental City project in the 1970s, a lab approach that aimed at addressing pressing ecological and social issues. Experimentation in the city has its roots in the field of sustainability transitions, which focus on experiments performed at various scales of the urban environment. From a sustainability transition perspective, an urban experiment can be defined as an inclusive and “practice based” initiative that addresses a contemporary challenge with the purpose of promoting innovation by means of social learning and in an uncertain environment , the latter relating to a complex system such as an urban area (Sengers et.al, 2016). In the urban context, the way forth might be experimentation and is notable through the extension of the role of local governments in order to address pressing challenges, such as climate change mitigation or social issues such as segregation (Mc Guirk et. al, 2014). Experimentation in cities is expressed through forms of urban laboratories which act as “designated spaces of innovation” (Marvin and Silver, 2016, p. 48) and spaces that attempt to create a link between urban theory and urban planning practice (Evans, Karvonen & Raven, 2016). Experimentation in the context of transition is not a linear, but a complex process that undergoes several stages, from the niche innovation, to influencing larger socio-technical structures while being influenced in turn by the socio-technical environment. This process is demonstrated in Figure 2.
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Figure 2: Linking Transition and niche experimentation. The demonstration of a non-linear process. Source: Loorbach et.al (2017); own edit
Experimentation in the urban context is linked with several processes that allow an experiment to be diffused into a broader context and create the foundations for significant wider change, understood as “transformation”. Von Wirth et.al (2018), explore three of these processes: embedding, translation, and scaling. The process of embedding is connected to the local scale and generates methods for adapting the experiment into the existing structures and particularities of the local context. Translation refers to the intracontextual application of experiments, when an experiment is replicated at another locale than the original where it was implemented in the first place and requires the creation of networks that transmit knowledge across locales. The final process, scaling, examines how experiments can grow on a different scale in terms of spatiality, content, the actors involved and also the resources required to implement an experiment. The diffusion processes discussed by Von Wirth et.al (2018) will be extensively analyzed and will provide a methodological foundation throughout this project for understanding transformation as a potential outcome of urban experimentation.
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3.1.3. The communicative turn in planning-collaborative planning
Much has been written in relation to co-creation and governance. The roots of a more integrated approach to urban governance can be found in what is known as the theory of communicative planning. The communicative paradigm was introduced in the 1990s and dominated the field of planning practice (Fischler, 2000), something that was also referred to as the “communicative turn” in planning theory and is related to the dismissal of traditional conventional modernist ideals of planning shifting into postmodern (Healy, 1992). John Forester, drawing from a Habermasian perspective and the communications theory of society, highlights the political embeddedness of communication as a planning process that plays a major role in the lives and organization of citizens but also in the very role of the planner (Forester, 1980). Communication is central in Habermas’s theorization and is related to a power free structure of human and social relations that allows its unobstructed flow. The communicative turn in planning is much related with the role of the planner and the shift from a technocratic approach of merely delivering advice or blueprints, to what Innes (1998) refers to as “telling the truth”. Planners operate within a messy world of power relations and what Innes wants to highlight from this phrase is that planners have a responsibility towards society and thus they should act between the power structures and not within. The postmodern shift of the communicative turn, made room for more progressive attitudes towards planning and one of them is that planning can be the result of collaboration and collective activity (Healy, 1992). Central to this understanding is the recognition of diversity and the plurality of needs that can be contradictory in many occasions but pave the road for the interdisciplinary and multi- dimensional approach to planning. A central element to this new approach is dialogue as a prerequisite for reaching consensus, and its facilitation between different wholes of the society with a normative approach to transforming existing structures whether those are material or power related (Healy, 1992). Thus, innovation lies at the core of the communicative approach. Drawing from the communicative turn as developed theoretically in the 1980s and the neoliberal turn related to the political and economical shifts of Thatcher’s era as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at the same historic period of time, Patsy Healy developed her thoughts on what she framed as “Collaborative Planning” (Healy, 1997;2003). For Healy (1998), collaboration is about creating flexible and “blurry” boundaries between the private sector the market, the state and the community and it rests upon five main concepts : (i) integrative place making; (ii) collaboration in policymaking; (iii) inclusive stakeholder involvement; (iv) use of 'local' knowledge; and (v) building 'relational' resources, as in networks of social significance in the forms of social and institutional capital (Healy, 1998, p. 1536). These
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
five concepts engage together is a continuous dialogue throughout the chapters to come as they are integral characteristics of an emerging concept that will be the core of the focus of this project, Urban Living Labs.
3.2. From Urban Labs to Living Labs and Urban Living Labs- Unraveling a “messy” concept
Defining Urban Living Labs comes with a great challenge, since there is no single definition in the literature but also due to the fact that their settings vary. This confusion is greatly created because of the different epistemologies that come together and constitute the theoretical and practical framework around Urban living Labs (Lucas Smas, personal communication, 2020). In order to be able to understand the nature of Urban Living Labs, one must first be introduced with the “Living lab” way of working. Living Labs have emerged in the recent years as new forms of urban actors-networks tend to be formed. One example of such networks are private-public partnerships or private-public –people partnerships (Puerari et.al, 2018). The latter form of partnership signifies that certain urban actors that lie outside the traditional schemes of government or governance seek recognition in the urban arena. The rise of various grassroots initiatives in the past decade is a signal that the urban actor arena is growing significantly as a response to the emergence of more wicked planning issues that need to be tackled. However before one moves into analyzing the nature of Urban Living Labs, one must recognize the broader conceptual family where they derive from. Urban Labs are an overarching umbrella term for platforms that provide the opportunity to address urban complexity through promoting elements of experimentation, participation and collaboration (Scholl et.al, 2017; Andrew Karvonen, personal communication, 2020). Urban Labs incorporate a great variety of forms of urban experimentations that fall under the categorization of a “Lab”, as seen in Figure 3). These typologies of labs demonstrate similarities but might differ at the core of their scope and actions. Living Labs is the typology of Urban Labs that comes under study in the present project.
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Figure 3: Different types of Urban Labs. Source: Scholl et.al (2017); own edit
The Living Lab approach to the creation of knowledge and socio-technical innovation refers to user-centered and open-innovations systems that operate as mediators between companies, citizens, research organizations, cities and regions (European Network of Living Labs, 2019). Through this definition, there is a clear emphasis on the process and its scope, which is to create new knowledge based on the premise of co-creation through experimentation. The user becomes a prominent key-feature of the Living Lab concept of co-creation (Steen & Van Bueren, 2017), but it is not the only one. This approach to spaces of experimentations departs from a traditional view that positions scientific laboratories as controlled environments and opens up the concept towards a new integrated understanding. The concept of living laboratory, among other things used in biology, where Charles Darwin back in the 1800s called the Galapagos Islands for "living laboratory of evolution". (Andersson et.al, 2018). One first comes across the notion of Living Labs in its contemporary popular meaning in the 1990s and more specifically in 1991, in a paper by Bajger et. al where a problem solving experimental approach by students in a neighborhood of Philadelphia was characterized as a “ Living-Laboratory” (Nesti, 2018). In the end of the 1990s the MIT Media Lab investigated the investigated a user-driven and human-centered approach to design by looking into human and computer relations (Peruariet.al, 2018). This project encompasses some of the fundamental characteristics that evolve around the notion of Living Labs and thus it can be seen as one of the first user-driven projects that capture the idea of co-creation from a Science and Technology Studies perspective by involving a wide range of stakeholders. Westerlund and Leminen (2011) refer to Living Labs as networks of innovation and define four main characteristics that determine a Living Lab ecosystem, and these are: co-creation, exploration,
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
experimentation and evaluation (see Figure 4). The first, co-creation refers to the simultaneous engagement of multiple and diverse actors of the Living Lab environment which can be both the producers of a product and its users, both becoming utilizers and enablers in the process. Exploration is linked with the discovery of new uses of products, or as one could put it, innovation. Experimentation is then of great importance as it relates to the real-time and/or real-life testing of innovation and finally we come across an evaluative stage of the whole process, which defines the success or not of the experimentation as well as the knowledge created and gained and ways in which this can replicated beyond the context and the scale where it was conducted. Although Westerlund and Leminen focus on a more market-driven approach to the concept of Living labs, the key features they come across are of great relevance to the process of open-innovation from a broader socio-technical scope.
Figure 4: Fundamental Processes of Living Labs, also applicable in Urban Living Lab methodologies. Source: Westerlund & Leminen (2011); Mccormick & Hartmann (2017) ; own edit
Westerlund and Leminen (2012) proceed to discuss four main typologies of Living Labs based on the main actor that becomes the driver of their activities. These are “uitilizer-driven”, “enabler-driven”, “provider-driven” and “user-driven” Living Labs. This typology distinction can be analyzed further in Table 1.
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Table 1: Drivers of Living Labs. Source: Leminen et.al (2012) Living Labs Utilizer-driven Enabler-driven Provider-driven User-driven Living Labs developed Living Labs organized and Living Labs that are Living Labs that focus on by companies in order operated by public-sector organized between solving every-day problems to serve a preset goal related actors and non- different developer within communities and regarding a product governmentals, entailing a organizations in open- stressing significant needs. or service. development-related innovation networks. Such Living Labs entail a more socio-spatial target. The main aim is to bottom-up approach when it Information is generated generate knowledge that comes to the planned activities, and shared within a can be used by the however in most cases they network of stakeholders members of that depend upon a “provider” that and actors network and benefit manages the program as a from it. whole.
The main difference between Living Labs and Urban Living Labs, is the fact that although the first can of a more dynamic and flexible nature when it comes to their function and operation, the latter are mostly space-bound (Chroneer et.al, 2018; Frantzeskaki, 2016). This means that the domain of Urban Living Labs becomes narrowed down to a certain geographical scale. The main outcome by this distinction is the fact that ULLs are highly contextualized processes of socio-technical experimentation and knowledge. Nesti (2018), provides with a broad definition of the concept, referring to ULLs as local experiments that are participatory in theory nature. Contextualization can refer to a local geographical space whether this means a neighborhood or a relatively larger urban area. One could argue that Urban Living Labs are a typology of Living Labs, however focusing on the urban fabric and its needs for transitioning into a more sustainable regime. Urban Living Labs can thus be seen as the “niches” where innovation with the purpose of the transition of a regime towards sustainability. Von Wirth, Fuenfschilling, Frantzeskaki and Coenen (2019) relate the concept of Urban Living Labs with the framework of sustainability transitions by highlighting the importance of experimental ways of diverting from a path-dependent status-quo. They underline that conventional policy will not be able to address future challenges and there need to be a transformative approach to governing for sustainability though experimental interventions, one of the being Urban Living Labs. Karvonen and von Heur (2014), seem to be like minded with the above approach to the concept, when identifying three main characteristics that constitute urban laboratories and separate them from other means of urban development. These are situatedness, change orientation and contingency. To elaborate more, situatedness refers to the spatial embeddedness of ULLs within the urban fabric, in a clear and bounded manner, relating to what was described above as the contextualization of ULLs. Urban
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Living Labs have boundaries that distinct them from the rest of the city, as specific sites of experimentation. Change-orientation indicates a departure from a business-as-usual way of urban practice and the pursuit of substantial transformative change. Contingency invokes the realization of the reality of uncertainty and the opportunities and risks that derive from this very condition of uncertainty. Embracing uncertainty is central to understanding the nature of Urban Living Labs and their potentials. The two main currents of the sustainability transitions studies are also visible through the various definitions of the concept of Urban Living Labs. Depending on the approach one focuses on, ULLs definitions can be influenced from the Science and Technologies studies current, a definition that relates Urban Living Labs to the smart city concept from an ICT application perspective, or from sustainability studies and social sciences, similarly to the approach on sustainability transitions studies. In many occasions one comes across a combined multidisciplinary definition of ULLs. Various scholars provide different definitions of the concept; however those definitions are not necessarily dissimilar. Von Wirth et. al (2019), refer to ULLs as sites within a city that allow stakeholders to test and gain knowledge from socio technical innovation in real time. This integration of both socio-ecological and socio-technical perspectives is also visible if someone examines the domains in which Urban Living Labs operate. McCormick & Hartmann (2017), distinguish five main fields of applicability of Urban Living Labs. These are the Information and Communication Technology sector (ICT), Energy and Mobility, social interaction and/or integration, spatial development and local sustainability. One could argue that many of those sectors are interrelated on a significant degree; however this wide application of the ULL framework signifies their potential importance for creating the foundation for notable progress in relation to sustainability transitions. The above definition bares both a spatial and a temporal dimension of ULLs, placing emphasis on the process of experimentation, which is central to their function and scope and linked with the framework of sustainability transitions. Steen and Van Bueren (2017), place emphasis on the element of participation, but also add another dimension, the element of locality. They refer to Urban Living Labs as spaces where local experimentation takes place. This element of locality is also what distinct Urban Living Labs from Living Labs according to the same authors, emphasizing on the territorial focus and the local sustainable solutions that are sought through an Urban Living Lab process. The main outcome by this distinction is the conclusion that ULLs are highly contextualized processes of socio-technical experimentation and knowledge (Frantzeskaki, 2016) and this element of contextualization and locality of practices is crucial to understand their functions and organization. Chroneer et al (2018) recognize this contested landscape around the definition of Urban Living Labs and attempt to draft a combined definition based on an extensive literature review on other scholars who also provide definitions. Their definition begins by emphasizing on the spatial element of ULLs,
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
describing them as a local place for innovative-based solutions. The element of space is accompanied by that of innovation, ULLs generate new knowledge. Then, Chroneer, Ståhlbröst and Habibipour proceed to add the aim of ULLs, which is to provide solutions to urban challenges and at the same time contribute to long term sustainable solutions. ULLs focus on the urban environment in relation to Living Labs that have a broader action scope as mentioned previously. The knowledge created, does not aim to provide with temporal solutions that aim at a short-term treatment of an urgency or a challenge, but rather sustainability is considered as a long term-target. Finally, the last part of this definition refers to the users and utilizers of Urban Living Labs. According to Chroneer et.al, the practices of ULLs aim at the co-creation of knowledge between citizens and other stakeholders, with those stakeholders not being specified. What one can observe from the last part of this definition is the relative strong reference to citizens as essential actors of an Urban Living Lab. The above definition is clearly divided into four parts, thus defining four main distinct characteristics of Urban Living Labs. Those are: geographic location (spatial embeddedness), the production of new knowledge, a clear aim for the production of this new knowledge, and finally co- production through the involvement of a variety of actors including citizens. If one employs the model of the quintuple helix to understand the context of Urban Living Labs, then the picture becomes clearer. The quintuple helix can be considered a model of and for innovation in the context of sustainable development. It is a broader and more comprehensive version of the “Triple” and “Quadruple” Helix Models, entailing five societal subsystems that interact in the generation of knowledge resources (Carayannis et.al, 2012). The quintuple helix model demonstrates the complexity of subsystem interaction and thus it can be applied to describe an urban system. By employing this model, one can place the generation of Urban Living Lab environments in the section of all subsystems
Figure 5: Urban Living Labs situated in the Quintuple Helix Model. Source: Carayannis & Campbell (2014)
A prominent emphasis in the ULL literature is given not only on what happens within an Urban Living Lab, but what occurs between different Urban Living Labs. Von Wirth et.al (2018), define three
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
diffusion processes between Urban Living Labs, their socio-technical context and their experimental conditions. These are the embedding of an experiment, the translation of an experiment and the scaling of an experiment. The embedding of an experiment has already been extensively discussed above; however the two latter processes present with great significance since they describe what can take place after or beyond an Urban Living Lab in terms of its transformative capacity. The process of translation (see Figure 6) refers to the application of an experiment on a different locale. It can be also described as the replication of the experiment, where the basic elements and characteristics used in an Urban Living Lab are adapted and then applied in another place with similar expected outcomes. Scaling, or scaling up on the other hand, is related to another kind of diffusion. It concerns the broader influence of the further development of experiments outside the original niche, as demonstrated in Figure 7. The scaling of an experiment can occur in different manners, such as between spatial or geographical scale, between a scale of actors and networks or resources. Scaling can be described as the diffusion of the content of an experiment and is a detrimental process to the transformative capacity of the concept of Urban Living Labs, as it goes not only beyond the local scale but at the same time beyond its own boundaries and can define the success of the experiment (Schmitt et.al, 2016). As it will be further discussed, the above processes with a prominent emphasis given to the “scaling up” of an experiment play a detrimental and defining role in the transformative capacity of Urban Living Labs.
Figure 6: The process of “translation”. The adaptation of a local experiment to a different local context. Source: Von Wirth et.al (2018) ; own edit
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Figure 7: The process of “scaling-up” from a single “niche” experiment. Source: Von Wirth et.al (2018); own edit
3.3. Typologies of Urban Living Labs
There have been various approaches to defining distinct typologies of Living Labs and Urban Living Labs. One advantage for defining typologies in the Urban Living Lab context compared to the Living Lab one is that the geographical element of space is defined, and thus it becomes clearer that the focus becomes more specific since one is discussing about main urban actors. Urban Living Labs typologies can be identified and described according to what type of innovation is produced. However, being a user- centered concept, different typologies of Urban Living Labs are mainly defined through their users, those urban actors that are integrated parts of them. Juujärvi and Pesso (2013), distinguish three main types of Urban Living Labs that respond to the question of what product or process is produced within an experimental environment in the urban context. In the first type, what is produced is feedback for a product or service and usually includes a wide application of ICT means of testing the above. The second typology is linked with the co-production of urban gear and services, while the third form of ULLs is a more visionary approach to urban planning practices that includes the engagement of citizens. What one can observe from the above categorization of typologies is that this distinction implies different levels and types of co-production. Not every typology of Urban Living Labs guarantees a high degree of normative –oriented co-production and also it is important to highlight that the degree and mode of participation can vary. Finally what is verified from the above is the main distinction between the two principal currents regarding ULLs, referring to the Science and Technology Orientation and the sustainability studies one, which encompasses more social
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
characteristics and priorities and creates the foundations for a wider connection between ULLs and the civil society with a transformative horizon.
Table 2: Classification of Urban Living Labs according to the product or service that is produced. Source: Juujärvi and Pesso (2013) Type of ULL Aim ICT oriented research environment Improvement of products or services Spatial ULLs Co-production of spatial features Visionary ULLs Transformative approach to urban planning practices
McCormick & Hartmann (2017) recognize three main distinct typologies of Urban Living Labs (in relation to who is the leading actor in the co-production process. The “strategic” type refers to ULLs that are organized either at the national level or by private actors. The main characteristic of this typology is the large scale of operation within an urban area and the plethora of projects related to that ULL. “Civic” ULLs usually relate to partnerships between urban actors such as universities, municipalities (or regions) or other developers. The last typology, “grassroot” ULLs are led by actors of the civil society. They usually have a limited budget and a local focus on matters on financial and issues of well-being.
Table 3: Actor-user oriented classification of Urban Living Labs according to their scale. Source: Mccormick & Hartmann (2017) Typologies Main Leading Scale Purpose Funding Actors Strategic ULLs Private Investors Large Developments Private -corporate funding for economic and/or government interests funding Civic ULLs Municipalities Varies Creating Co-funding Partnerships for Sustainable Development Grassroot (or Organic) ULLs Civil Society Local Addressing Limited resources-local Organizations local issues collaborative efforts
McCormick and Hartman (2017) recognize another four different typologies of ULLs, based on their capacities and means that contribute to a transitioning environment. “Trial” ULLs test in real life conditions products, technologies and processes. “Enclave” ULLs obtain a segregated approach to innovation by forming a protected environment for experimentation. The typology of “demonstration” refers to the creation of images of the future for an urban environment, presenting alternative views of what the urban could resemble. Finally the typology of “platform”, aims at creating a partnership arena
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
which merges different interest and leads to the emergence of new synergies. These typologies, if combined with the ones of the above table create a puzzled landscape which highlights the complexity and the wide applicability of the Urban Living Lab framework’s multispectral approach. Bulkeley et. al (2019) expand on the above typologies and create a more explicit framework by highlighting two concepts related with the distinction of typologies of Urban Living Labs, drawing from the work of Karvonen and Heur (2014) and these are situatedness and change orientation. Situatedness refers to the grounding of labs as places where knowledge is constructed and has the potential to be replicated or scaled up as this process is referred to by Pincetl (2016), to also be relevant outside the locality of an ULL. They go on to define more characteristics that are used to examine the focus of each type of ULL. One way they do so is by examining the relationship between the urban set and the laboratory, and how the urban setting is perceived by each typology. Another classification of Urban Living Labs typologies can be achieved by analyzing the type of innovation that is sought through the experimental environment. Andersson et. al (2018) distinguish six different types of innovation that is succeeded through the ULL framework, as seen in Table 4. They also identify to broader categories regarding the fields of innovation, and these are technological innovation and innovation in the public sector. This classification of ULLs can also related to the previous typologies mentioned in respect to which actor is responsible and applicable for which type of innovation.
Table 4: Urban Living Labs’ Innovation Typologies. source: Andersson et.al, 2018 Type of Innovation Aim Product Innovation Development of new products/improvements and services Process Innovation Changes in the production and delivery methods Organizational Innovation New organizational methods (e.g business models) Market Innovation New marketing methods Social Innovation New ways of addressing social issues and social capacity System Innovation Larger changes in socio-technical systems
The above classification of Urban Living Labs makes it clear that different methods are linked with all these different modes of innovation. The question to be answered at this point is how Urban Living Labs contribute to a transitioning environment, what methods they usually entail to address pressing local sustainability issues and for what means. Urban Living Labs incorporate a wide range of activities for reaching their aims but the methods used vary according to the needs of each case, its goals and of its participants.
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3.4. The relevance of Urban Living Labs in the Swedish planning context
As a precondition to examine and understand the relevance of the concept of Urban Living Labs in the Swedish planning context, a brief historical reference is needed in order to comprehend the important nodes that led up to today’s conditions and why municipalities still maintain a decisive role in a changing global environment. There have been five major shifts in the history of the modern Swedish planning history (Engstrom & Cars, 2013). The first regarded the establishment of a social vision by the welfare state, concerning the provision of “a desirable home for everybody”. During the 1960s, at the peak of the economic growth, one can identify the second major shift, which relates to the Fordist approach to urban planning and development. Urban growth was managed by municipalities through developers and secured state financing, a state that led to the industrial-scale production of the urban environment. It was then when planners obtained the role of the “social engineer” a term that related to the capability of planning experts to make predictions on social needs, however on a period of linear development. This condition changed rapidly in the 1970s. Sweden was affected by two multi-dimensional crises, the first oil crisis and the rising social tension in the city suburbs. The failure of the planners’ social engineer role led to the establishment of the economists as experts on urban development in Sweden and a period of de-regulation was initiated. The 1980s were an important period for modern urban planning in Sweden, since the 1987 Planning and Building Act (plan- och bygglagen). The 1987 Planning and building act introduced the concept of comprehensive planning and established citizen participation (Blücher, 2013). During the 1990s, a major shift came as a response to a new economic crisis and the public sector had to cut down on expenses, leading to the emergence of private investors as the main actors-drivers of development. This market-oriented approach to planning and the further downgrading of the role of the planner led to acceleration of processes of segregation and gentrification. In the dawn of the 21st century however, the challenges have become even greater. Today in Sweden there are three administrative divisions, the national level, the regional level (counties) and the municipal level. Although spatial planning is guided through legislation from the national level, there is no national actor or administrative body responsible for spatial planning. This task falls upon the municipalities and this is way it is generally referred to as “municipalities’ planning monopoly” (Persson, 2013). Municipalities in Sweden are responsible for several issues that are related to spatial planning, such as health and environmental protection, waste collection and disposal, emergency plans, maintenance of streets and public spaces, housing, energy provision cultural activities and others (Hägglund, 2013). In practice, this planning monopoly means that Swedish municipalities are responsible
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for finding ways through which they can address complex issues related to social, environmental and economic aspects of sustainability (Mäntysalo, 2015). The planning monopoly is mainly expressed through comprehensive plans. Municipalities are responsible for preparing and keeping up-to-date comprehensive plans, which are statutory plans that provide with a guideline for decision-making over issues like land- use, the built environment, water areas management for a long term period of 20 to 30 years (Elbakidze et. al, 2015). At the same time comprehensive plans cater for a more integrative perspective by addressing multiple aspects of sustainability (socio-economic and environmental) and at the same time ensuring citizen participation in the planning process. A great challenge related to the Swedish municipalities is that they are able to safeguard public interests, although having this kind of planning monopoly. If municipalities only expect ready-made solutions drafted by other actors, then they might find themselves in a difficult position keeping up with public demands and addressing pressing sustainability issues that demand a more integrated and communicative approach through the close cooperation of national, regional and local actors and through the active engagement of citizens in the process (Engström & Cars, 2013). Engström and Cars also point towards the direction of a new planning model that will have its foundations on the early more informal stages of comprehensive planning. Today, comprehensive plans serve more as tools for development, hence missing this integrative perspective (Mäntysalo, 2015). It would seem like urban planning in Sweden has reached a tipping point as of today. The growing challenges that local governments have to address in Sweden point towards a new direction that urban planning practice must undertake based on the premise that no single actor bares the “power of planning” and thus there needs to be established an arena for new collaborations and dialogue between various stakeholders and increased participation by citizens. The role of the Swedish municipality, which compared to other European municipalities bares more responsibilities (Hägglund, 2013), is to create the foundations for this dialogue and interaction between stakeholders to become fruitful and at the same time be able to negotiate development with private actors in order to ensure long term public interests will be ensured (Engström & Cars, 2013). Comprehensive plans can act as the entity where this collaborative environment is established, by introducing the establishment of Urban Living Labs as important prior-to-development tools for creating the collaborative and innovative environment that was described above. In Sweden Urban Living Labs are usually referred to through the lens of the concept of smart cities and/ or smart governance. Lucas Smas and Kes Mccormick (personal communication,2020) highlight that although Urban Living Labs have sporadically emerged in the Swedish urban context, it is still a relatively new phenomenon and its emergence is mostly linked with knowledge institutes such as Universities. It is common thus, the phenomena of Urban Living Labs appearing in cities with a prominent academic
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presence, such as Stockholm, Malmö and Lund. At the moment, Urban Living Labs in Sweden serve as nodes in larger scale international networks of Urban Living Labs such as those initiated by JPI Urban Europe (Andrew Karvonen & Jonas Bylund, personal communication, 2020).
4. Exploring the transformative capacity of Urban Living Labs in the Swedish context
The aim of this chapter is to explore the diffusion capacities of Urban Living Labs by studying and analyzing five cases that were established in the Swedish context. The five projects were chosen after extensive desk study and interview contacted with professionals who have been involved with the topic of Urban Living Labs in Sweden. All five cases were chosen because they have acquired a user-centered perspective, although as it will be discussed, they present with varying structures and aims.
4.1. The five case studies
Von Wirth et.al (2019) suggests a framework of six strategies that indicate processes of diffusion and the potential of Urban Living Labs to initiate changes within a broader context. These are: transformative place-making, activating network partners, replication of lab structure, education and training, stimulating entrepreneurial growth and narratives of impact. These strategies link the context of Urban Living Labs with the theoretical notions of the sustainability transition concept and especially impact the diffusion processes of embedding, translation and scaling. These transition processes can be a prerequisite for Urban Living Labs’ transformative capacity; however transformation is not necessarily the aim of every experiment (von Wirth et.al, 2019). The aim of the present chapter is to examine these strategies through analyzing five case studies of Urban Living Labs in the Swedish context: The “Experiment Stockholm” project, “New Light in Alby” and “Shape your World” as parts of the “SubUrbanLab” project, “Malmö Innovation Platform” and “Hållbarheten” in Malmö.
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4.1.1. A synthesis of two case studies: The ‘Mobile in Vienna-Liesing’ and “Experiment Stockholm”.
The “Mobile in Vienna Liesing” and the “Experiment Stockholm” were two Urban Living Lab which took place as a joint project initiated by JPI Urban Europe under the name “CASUAL Project”. CASUAL project aimed at promoting a more sustainable way of life and an innovative approach to urban governance through the engagement of citizens and other stakeholders (Criollo Alvarez, 2016). What was sought through the project was a more “humanistic” approach to urban planning and its practices by placing people in the center of sustainable planning as experts of their experiences. The name “CASUAL” referred to the quality of life in the urban context and how an alternative people-centered approach to urban planning can lead to the creation of more “cozy” urban environments. Although the two projects were not originally labeled as Urban Living Labs, the existence of certain common characteristics led to them being studied as such in the process and after their completion (Smas, interview, 2020). Three cities were chosen to be part of the program and the research was conducted by three institutions residing in each of them. Randstad, Vienna and Stockholm were selected as being to urban areas on the verge of transition in terms of population development as well as strategies that intend to cope with pressing sustainability issues such as energy efficiency, consumption, mobility and the provision of services (Nordregio et.al, 2016). The three institutions involved were TU Delft, the Austrian Institute for Spatial Planning and the Nordic Center for Spatial Development (Nordregio). The concept of co-creation through experimentation was central to the implementation of the CASUAL project, and thus introducing an Urban Living Lab framework seemed very relevant to the stakeholder- driven approach that was suggested (Urban Europe, 2016). An Urban Living Lab approach was followed for two of the three cases, for Vienna and Stockholm. Two locales came under study in each of the two cities and became the spatial reference points of the project: Wiesen Ost in Vienna and Årstafältet in Stockholm. In the case of the “Mobile in Vienna-Liesing” branch of the project, the aim of this experiment was to set a local example for inclusive governance, focusing in the field of mobility and transport (Urban Europe, 2016). Several actors took part in this project such as the municipal administration, neighborhood management entities, local organizations, the local borough authority and residents of Liesing. In respect of the actors that took part in the project, it would seem like the structure resembles a civic oriented typology of an Urban Living Lab. This ULL framework followed three main steps. In the first step, 400 residents of the area participated in a telephone survey regarding their leisure mobility and transport and social infrastructure preferences. Then, 20 residents were invited to talk about their mobility behaviors and preferences by answering specific questions through the method of “Communal Probes”. This
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method aims at gaining a perspective on the citizens’ behaviors and preferences in a co- creative way. Finally the results from this procedure were displayed at a publicly accessible exhibition. The “Mobile in Liesing” project mostly focused on specific aspects of co-creation through enhanced citizen engagement and thus presented with a limited approach to a transformative scaling up of such experiments. In other words what was missing from this experimental approach was to present with ways of connecting temporary and informal practices with modes of formal planning procedures (Urban Europe, 2016). However, what was achieved through this ULL approach was the increased learning opportunity for participants and other members of the community and the diffusion of knowledge from the research institution towards the community by raising awareness over issues of mobility and transportation. On the other hand the gap between the community and the municipal authorities remained. In the case of “Experiment Stockholm” one can observe a completely different approach to the concept of Urban Living Labs, an approach that highlights both methodological opportunities and at the same time strong shortcomings that occur when an Urban Living Lab methodology is applied in real-life conditions. The project was implemented between 2013 and December of 2015 and focused on the development of the suburb of Årstafältet in the south of Stockholm. It is important though to examine the steps that were initially followed and led up to the finalization of the project and the exhibition in Färgfabriken, a foundation for art, architecture and urbanism, with interesting results. The aim of “Experiment Stockholm” was to explore and test new ideas and reflect on how Stockholm is being developed and formed in a co-creative manner. The experiment acted as a safe space for testing innovative ideas and stakeholders’ synergies through exhibitions, debates, seminars and workshops (see Figure 8) (Färgfabriken, 2015). To the core of the project was the experimentation and co- creation through art installations. The preparation for the final exhibition focused on identifying funding, the themes to be at the focus and actors to participate from within the Stockholm region. In total 35 partners were identified in the process, some of them being municipalities, such as Haninge, Knivsta, Sollentuna, Nacka and Stockholm, non-profits, county councils (the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, The Nordic Building Exhibition, the Swedish Architects Union, The Nordic Building Exhibition), research institutions and private companies in related fields (Urban Europe, 2016). It is important to note that all these partners of the project were also the major funders. In the spring of 2015, meetings were organized between actors-participants of the project and the main themes of the exhibition were identified as a precondition to approach artists who would create the related exhibits. In total nine thematic were decided upon as Table 5 demonstrates. The main themes for discussion were introduced by consultants, representatives from Färgfabriken and representatives from the municipality (Nordregio et.al, 2016)
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Table 5: Themes that emerged during the project. Source: Nordregio et.al (2016), Färgfabriken , 2015
Themes of “Experiment Stockholm” Description City, suburb, countryside On the typologies and conflicts within the urban fabric Interaction and Integration Discussing the issue of segregation in Stockholm Nodes and Hubs On mobility and flows between the regional cores “The bigfoot” On the pathway to a more sustainable footprint Dialogue is not monologue On whose voice is being heard
Informal Methods On the potentials and challenges of tactical urbanism Varied Buildings, Varied functions On resilient urban structures
Beyond the car age On accessibility and active mobility Planning for the unplanned Planning for unprecedented change and shocks
Figure 8: Workshop activities during the “Experiment Stockholm” Project. Source: Nordregio et.al, 2016
What is clear from the way “Experiment Stockholm” was structured is that there was a normative aim to define new approaches to urban development through innovation and experimentation in a co-creative environment. However, what can be questioned at this point is the degree of inclusivity of urban stakeholders in the project. It would seem like only actors who took part in the funding of the project had the right to be part of it and this left out a very important urban actor, the citizen, whether organized in associations or as an individual (Nordregio et.al, 2016; Lucas Smas, personal communication, 2020). The whole process can be described as a more exclusive approach to innovation. However even the concept of innovation itself emerged as
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problematic in the context of the project. The participants during the workshops and meetings that framed the various experiments did not proceed to engage in unconventional and beyond the business-as-usual professional approach to urban planning practices. This, according to Schmitt et. al (2016), indicated an incompetency of the participants to abandon their traditional roles and engage in a more creative process of discussing contemporary urban planning topics, although the environment set by Färgfabriken urged towards this direction. Furthermore, one could argue that since the experiment was spatially embedded and referred to the development of Årstafältet, there should have been a different approach to defining the themes and framework to be discussed, as well as the methods employed to achieve the expected outcomes.
4.1.2. The SubUrbanLab Project: “Social Uplifting and Modernization of Suburban Areas with an Urban Living Lab Approach”-The case of “New Light in Alby Hill” and “Shape your world”
A different approach to an Urban Living Lab environment was sought in the case of the SubUrbanLab project which took place from 2013 to 2016 in Alby, Botkyrka Municipality in Sweden and in Peltosaari, in the City of Riihimäki, Finland. The main objective of this project was to examine the modernization and social uplift of “less-valued” suburbs and their transformation to attractive and sustainable urban areas through the participation of residents and other stakeholders (Urban Europe, 2013; Voytenko et.al, 2016). The whole project was funded by VINNOVA and Tekes through JPI Urban Europe (Buhr et.al, 2016) and the main partners engaged in the Urban Living Lab where IVL Swedish Environmental Research institute, Botkyrka municipality, VTT Technical Research Centre and the City of Riihimäki. It was decided from the initial stages of the project that the approach to the suggested aim would be creating an Urban Living Lab environment. The framing of the project under this concept created at the same time a second main objective of the project and this was to test the application and the capacities of Urban Living Labs by defining boundary conditions and success factors (Urban Europe, 2013). The main reason for the implementation of an Urban Living Lab methodology was to create and interactive environment where people are integrated into planning and development processes with a specific focus on a local sustainability issue (Voytenko et.al, 2016). The “SubUrbanLab” consisted of six Urban Living Labs as presented in Table 6.
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Table 6: the Urban Living Labs of the SubUrbanLab project. Source: Voytenko et.al, 2016 Urban Living Lab Location Aim “Shape your world” Alby, Botkyrka, Sweden Promoting urban gardening activities among the youth and the modernization of the suburb “New light on Alby Hill” Alby Hill, Botkyrka, Sweden Experimenting with LED lighting as a precondition for more security and attractiveness “Vacant space Alby” Central Alby, Botkyrka, Sweden The re-use of abandoned spaces by residents “Energetic cooperation” Peltosaari district of Riimäki, The provision of smart-meters to resident as a Finland precondition for more sustainable electricity consumption “Sustainable decisions” Peltosaari district of Riimäki, To raise awareness about sustainable energy for Finland decision-makers “Together more” Peltosaari district of Riimäki, New functions in a community building Finland
These Urban Living Labs although seemingly different in context they all respond to a common sustainability issue identified throughout European cities. Suburbs that were built between the 1960s and 1970s are presenting with increasingly problematic issues related to their need for modernization. Segregation, technological inefficiency and high energy consumption due to aging infrastructure are some of the common issues identified among urban areas that are suburbs of larger urban areas such as Botkyrka in Stockholm and Peltosaari in Riimäki (Buhr et.al, 2016). Two urban living lab cases from Sweden that stand out are the “New Light on Alby Hill” and “Shape your world”, in Alby, an area of Botkyrka Municipality in the region of Stockholm. Alby is one of the five municipal districts of Botkyrka Municipality. Alby is the home of approximately 13750 of the municipality’s residents (90000 in total) and is mainly built up through large blocks of flats from the “Million Homes Program” era (Botkyrka Kommun, 2019). Botkyrka municipality is itself a highly diverse place. 100 different languages are spoken in the municipality and in Alby, about 60% of the population has a foreign (non-Swedish) background, which means that they themselves have been born outside Sweden or their parents have been born in another country (Karlsson et.al, 2016). The Urban Living Labs in Alby are in line with the six targets developed by the municipality of Botkyrka in relation to sustainable development with a main emphasis on the social dimension of sustainability. These areas are: employment, social security, education, climate change, public health and democracy. Signing the Aalborg Charter in 2004 was a major reason for developing these six targets (Karlsson et.al, 2016; Gustaffsson & Hjelm, 2009). The Urban Living Labs in Alby are also related to the 5 sub-targets set for the area: (i) “Ensuring a decent setting for girls and boys to grow up with” (ii) Improving the employment opportunities of women and men, (iii) Renewing the urban environment, (iv) Modernizing Alby’s identity and (v) Trying out new working methods for the municipality (Karlsson et.al, 2016). The “New Light on Alby Hill project focused on the redevelopment of a walkway in Alby Botkyrka that created a sense of insecurity to the residents of the area, especially women (Menny et.al, 2018). The project took place from 2013 to 2016, while the implementation phase occurred between the autumn of
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2014 and the winter of 2015 involving approximately 130 residents as participants in the different activities related with the project through the “Residents Council” (Borådet) of Alby. The idea behind the transformation of the walkway responded to both aspects of social and environmental sustainability. Community Safety is addressed by the normative aim of the creation of a safer space for everyone through the installation of more lighting equipment. The walkway was identified as unsafe after dialogue processes and surveys with residents. The project consisted of four main objectives (Karlsson et.al, 2016): (i) to improve the sense of security, (ii) to create a more energy efficient and attractive streetlight (iii) To increase engagement and participation within the community and (iv) facilitate dialogue processes. Environmental issues are also given prominent priority. LED technology was used as being a more environmental friendly and inexpensive and creative means of lighting through a technique referred to as “creation of ambient lighting”. What is more, the community was actively involved in the creation of art installations that would become part of the walkway. Local residents and school children were involved in the creation and decision over which art installations would be selected to feature the walkway (see Figure 9). The images were projected on three prominent rock formations along the walkway (Buhr et.al, 2016). On this project, three main stakeholders that actively took part can be identified: The Municipality of Botkyrka, the private housing company “Mitt Alby”, residents and the Swedish Environmental Research Institute (IVL). However besides the main partners, various other professionals were involved in the implementation of the idea generated, such as architects, lighting designers and local entrepreneurs (Buhr et.al, 2016; Anja Karlsson, personal communication, 2020). The “Shape your World” Urban Living Lab took place from November 2013 to October 2014 in Alby and more specifically in coordination with the Alby Youth Club and located at its facilities and other chosen locations within Alby. To the core of the “Shape you World” project again in Alby, Botkyrka, was the involvement of youth in urban gardening activities as a means to raise awareness over the benefits of urban gardening and towards the issue of sustainability and urban sustainability as a whole (Anja Karlsson, personal communication, 2020). By youth it is clarified that the participants were children and young adults (Karlsson et.al, 2016). The users of the Urban Living Lab, in this case the young people who participated also had the opportunity to choose the locations where urban gardening activities would be performed. “Shape your world” was also part of the overall aim of demonstrating how suburbs in “less valued” areas can be socially uplifted (Urban Europe, 2016). Urban gardening activities were introduced as after-school occupation for students both as a means to promote knowledge around sustainability issues and at the same time as a means to promote encounters and the creation of bonds between the younger members of the community through local participation (Urban Europe, 2016).
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The project “Shape your World” was initiated by IVL, Botkyrka Municipality and Boodla, which is a social entrepreneur that engages with urban gardening especially through school related activities (Karlsson et.al, 2016 ; Boodla, 2020). The main facilitator of the Urban Living Lab was Boodla.
Figure 9: Art installations and LED technology in “New light in Alby project”, source Buhr et.al, 2016
4.1.3. Malmo Innovation Platform
The Malmo Innovation Platform (MIP) was initiated in 2013 with the aim of bringing together urban actors with in order to create innovation capacities around the topic of renovation and energy efficiency of existing apartments in southeast Malmö (Mccormick & Kiss, 2015). This area of Malmö that was the focus of the project ia a part of the “Million Homes Programme” (Miljonprogrammet), a public housing program initiated by the Swedish government between the years 1965 and 1974 aiming at creating one million new housing units across Sweden. Today, the aging infrastructure of apartment buildings from that era has led to the need of renovating these buildings (Naumann et.al, 2018). The MIP experiments with new technologies in the areas of heating systems renovations, water and waste, as well as promoting initiatives that drive tenant behavior (Mccormick & Kiss, 2015). The aim of the Platform was to use means of physical regeneration as a driver for socio- economic development (Mccormick & Kiss, 2015). The MIP was part of a broader project funded by Urban Europe, the Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions project (GUST). The aim of GUST project is to “examine, inform and advance the governance of sustainability transitions through Urban Living Labs”, by (i) researching the design and format of ULLs, (ii) impacts of ULLs put into practice, (iii) examining processes of translation and scaling of ULLS and (iv) examining processes of knowledge co-production through a synthesis of empirical results (urbanlivinglabsnet, 2017). By default, the GUST project is more
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focused on a normative approach to the research of the transformative capacities of ULLs by interpreting their transitional processes. The project included 16 in-depth analysis of case studies from Sweden, Austria, the UK and the Netherlands. In the case of the Malmo Innovation Platform, different stakeholders were integrated for the purpose described above. The main stakeholders were the municipality of Malmö, the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics (IIIEE) at Lund University, Malmö University, the Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences as well as industry partners such as IBM, E.ON and Skanska, and community actors such as schools, community groups and housing associations. Apart from being a co- creation oriented process, the MIP was intended to become a platform for the promotion of educational processes and the generation of knowledge through different educational activities, such as evaluation exercises, master thesis projects, research projects, role-debate exercises, collaborative education schemes between universities and reflection seminars (Mccormick & Kiss, 2015). On a final note, it should be highlighted that MIP is a can be seen as a vivid demonstration of the quadruple helix model of partnership generation between the academia, the local government, the public and the industry. The creation of strong networks of partnership is in fact a more important goal for the project than the implementation of actual projects themselves, although more than 50 of them were initiated (Naumann et.al, 2018).
4.1.4. Hållbarheten (Western Harbor, Malmö)
The Urban Living Lab project Hållbarheten was initiated in April 2013 and continued up to 2016 in the center of Western Harbor neighborhood in the city of Malmö. The lead partner of the project was EoN, a major energy company, but the partnership included Lund University and the City of Malmö, who is the landowner. The focus area of the project was the research into new sustainable technologies and energy efficiency and transport oriented research into the topic of electric and gas vehicles (see Figure 10). The project was narrowed down to the scale of an apartment building were residents were integrated into experimenting with energy efficiency and the evaluation of energy solutions. The goal of EoN was to test the energy use in households in real-life settings (GUST, 2016). In 2013, seven families moved into the apartment building, where each apartment was fueled by a different energy source, ranging from solar power, wind power, solar heating and biogas to district heating. Moreover, the families residing in the apartment building were given different means of sustainable transportation, including electric bikes, an electric car and the possibility to lease a biogas-driven car (E.ON, 2013 ; Brask, 2015). All the above indicate an Urban Living Lab environment that was organized with the purpose of, enhancing environmental sustainability and experimenting with sustainable lifestyles and the household’s
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capacity in this direction through extensive user involvement. The goal of the project was to achieve a self-sufficient energy system for a building and drive energy consumption below 65 kWh/m2 (GUST, 2016). The evaluation of the feedback is performed through the employment of approximately 100 indicators on temperature and energy consumption (E.ON, 2013). During the project, the residents become active users of the experimental settings and constantly provide the company with feedback.
Figure 10: The “smart home” in Western Harbor, Malmö, source: E.ON
4.1.5. An analysis of the five case studies
The five selected Urban Living Lab case studies can be analyzed under the light of the three different categorizations described in chapter 3.5; the type of innovation that is produced within the ULL, the typology of actor constellation and the typology of the product or service that is produced. A general observation through the classification attempted is that a common pattern emerges, signifying that most of the Urban Living Labs analyzed follow a mixed typology especially when it comes to the innovation type and the typology of the product or service produced. This reflects the variety of goals and aims that are linked with the operation of the different Urban Living Labs. What can also be observed is that there is a correlation between the type of innovation generated in the Urban Living Lab environment and the product or service produced. For instance, in both
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the cases of the “Malmö Innovation Platform” and “Hållbarheten”, the typology of “System Innovation” is linked with the typology of Visionary Urban Living Labs. What does not remain constant in this interrelation, is the means, which refers to the actors involved and the actor in charge or with a greater role and/or responsibility among others that are part of the Urban Living Lab. What is important to highlight is the frequent emergence of the civic-oriented typology of ULLs, something that points towards the importance of municipalities and their leading role in urban experimentation through Urban Living Lab schemes. This role is highly projected on a greater degree both in the cases of the “New Light in Alby Hill” and the “Malmö Innovation Platform”, although in the latter the most prominent role belongs to the University of Lund as a leading partner. The only case out of the four that clearly resembles a strategic type of Urban Living Lab, is “Hållbarheten”. The Swedish energy company E.ON is clearly the leading actor within the partnership generated as well as the biggest finance provider. Funding is also a major factor that shapes actor constellations in Urban Living Labs schemes. This is also very evident in the project of “Experiment Stockholm”, in which case all partners were also part of the funding scheme. Consequently, various other actors that cannot financially contribute to one such project tend to be left out from such initiatives. Finally it should be noted that although various Urban Living Labs can be labeled as “civic-oriented”, this does not necessarily imply that municipalities or agents of the civil society are the leading actors of the schemes. This evident in the case of the “New Light on Alby Hill” project in which case although civil society actors play a prominent role in the planned activities of the project, the main drivers are knowledge institutes and the local administration. Table 7 also provides an insight into how different frameworks and typology approaches to Urban Living Labs can be brought together with the purpose of creating a more compact theorization of the concept and its typologies. A vivid correlation can be observed between the actor constellation typologies and the “Drivers of Innovation typologies”. These two different classifications concerning the actors that are part of Urban Living Labs and their designated roles, demonstrate a connection between two different literature frameworks, the first set by JPI Urban Europe, and the latter by Leminen and Westerlund (2012).
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Table 7: Typologies of the five case studies of ULLs Urban Living Lab Innovation Actor Typology of Disposition Driver of Type constellation product or Typology Innovation Typology service produced “Experiment Process Mixed typology: Spatial urban Trial Enabler-Driven Stockholm” innovation Civic-oriented Living Lab and strategic- Organizational oriented Innovation “New Light on Alby Product Civic-oriented Spatial Urban Demonstratio Enabler-Driven Hill” Innovation Living Lab n/Trial
Process Innovation
Social innovation “Shape your world” Civic-Oriented Spatial Urban Demonstratio Enabler-Driven Social Innovation Living Lab n/Trial
Process Innovation “Malmö Innovation Product Civic-oriented Spatial Urban Platform Provider-Driven Platform” Innovation Living Lab
Process Visionary Urban Innovation Living Lab
System Innovation “Hållbarheten” Product Strategic- Visionary Urban Enclave/ Trial Utilizer-Driven Innovation oriented Living Lab
Process ICT oriented Innovation research environment System innovation
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Table 8: Indicators/strategies of ULLs diffusion processes and the five ULLs case studies Source: von Wirth et.al, 2019 Embedding Translating Scaling Urban Living Lab Transformative Activating Network Replication of Education and Stimulating Narratives of Impact Place making Partners Lab structures Training entrepreneurial (Acceleration) growth “Experiment Focus in the locale of The pursuit of new Replication of Engagement of Experiment Stockholm as a Stockholm” Årstafältet innovative means of knowledge participant with staff training opportunity for Färgfabriken as a space communication between generated in real innovative modes of municipalities for initiatives and municipalities, life contextual urban planning innovative approaches to professionals, private conditions (eg in the practices-mutual sustainable development. companies: The municipality of learning generation of Stockholm) multidisciplinary networks.
“New Light on Alby Integration of Urban New partnerships Replication of lab Educational and Generation and sharing of Hill” Living Lab activities in a between professional structures within learning activities that knowledge in the context of the specific locale-co creation actors, the civil society, the context of the included young “SubUrbanLab Project” for local community and the municipality of “SubUrbanLab members of the between Urban Living Labs infrastructure Botkyrka Project”. community
Replication of lighting outcomes in other areas of the municipality. “Shape your The general goals of the Partnership generation Replication of lab Educational and Generation and sharing of world” SubUrbanLab project between community structures within learning activities that knowledge in the context of the were adapted in Alby actors, local the context of the included young “SubUrbanLab Project” through the concept of administration and social “SubUrbanLab members of the youth community entrepreneurs Project” community Contribution to the gardening sustainability targets set for Replication of Raising awareness on Alby structures by sustainability issues Boodla in other Use of knowledge generated by urban gardening Boodla in new projects projects in the period 2015-2018
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Table 8: Indicators/strategies of ULLs diffusion processes and the five ULLs case studies Source: von Wirth et.al, 2019 Embedding Translating Scaling Urban Living Lab Transformative Activating Replication of Education and Stimulating Narratives of Impact Place making Network Partners Lab structures Training entrepreneurial growth “Malmö Innovation Renovation and The creation of Replication of Focusing on The development of Continuous co-production of Platform” energy upgrading of partnerships between knowledge and urban new business knowledge/generation of existing apartment knowledge institutes, innovation under experimentation concepts knowledge among all partners buildings in southeast local governments, University as a learning and Malmö regional government supervision (Lund educational actors, the private University) process through Lessons from past development sector and civil the engagement can be useful for the future society actors of students development of Malmö-“fed into new projects” Hållbarheten Notions of Activation of Feedback was Ideas for scaling up beyond local sustainable lifestyle – partnerships between managed by E.ON buildings energy consumption EoN, the city of energy company patterns embedded in Malmö and Lund a fixed locale University Excess energy (Apartment in produced sold to EoN Western Harbor)
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Table 9: The five cases of ULLs and the area(s) of sustainability they relate to.
Urban Living Lab Response to Sustainability “Experiment Stockholm” Environmental sustainability/ Economic Sustainability “New Light on Alby Hill” Environmental Sustainability/Social Sustainability “Shape your world” Environmental Sustainability/Social Sustainability “Malmö Innovation Platform” Environmental Sustainability/Economic Sustainability/ Social Sustainability “Hållbarheten” Economic Sustainability/Environmental Sustainability
What can be observed through the above analysis of the diffusion strategies of the examined Urban Living Labs, presented in Table 8, is that each of them follows a very diverse diffusion process and at the same time this reflects the scope and goals of each experiment. When it comes to embedding strategies, all of the experiments present with processes of spatial and temporal embeddedness and spatial reference points that refer to specific spaces such as in the case of Hållbarheten or in broader areas such as in the case of the “Malmö Innovation Platform”. A prominent example of how an experiment is embedded in a local context can be found in the case of the “SubUrbanLab” and the two Urban Living Labs that were set up in Alby. The goals of the project were successfully transferred in to specific locales and more specifically in the context of Alby, in line with the local particularities and conditions. What is more, the content and goals of the Urban Living Labs were set so as to match with the local targets set by Botkyrka Municipality for Alby which demonstrates that the lab conditions were not separate from the local governance context. Renewing the urban environment and creating a decent environment for girls and boys to grow up, especially through cultivating young peoples’ creativity by promoting democratic values, were two of the main targets set for Alby in the Development Program of 2009 (Botkyrka Kommun, 2009). These targets were sought through both “New light in Alby” and “Shape your world” Urban Living Labs. This aspect of the “embeddedness” diffusion process attributed to urban experiments, demonstrates the capacity of ULLs to address locally set sustainability targets.
The provision of a space to experiment is essential as a prerequisite for transition processes to be initiated. The embedding of an experiment also relates to the activation of fertile partnership networks in the spatial reference context, which is considered an important process also in the context of sustainability transitions studies, especially when those partnerships are generated in the local level (von Wirth et.al, 2019 ; Evans & Karvonen, 2011). The creation of networks in relation to a given area or space is a key to identifying an experiment as an Urban Living Lab and this was clearly demonstrated in all the discussed five cases. Maybe this can be more vividly demonstrated in the case of the “Malmö Innovation Platform” were one can observe a clear formation of an entity that resembles a strong quadruple helix
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
network that applies to several projects in a given spatial context. What can be observed in the case of MIP, is the clear and proactive role of the academia as a node for knowledge transmission within the network formed. It has to be recognized though that all the studied cases present some form of network generation although these can be very different kinds of networks. For instance in the case of “Experiment Stockholm”, one can observe the aim of the formation of a network of professionals that are related with the planning context. However, in regards to the processes of translating and especially the scaling of the experiments, the Urban Living Labs examined follow a diverse approach. This distinct approach reflects a broader difficulty of Urban Living Labs to indulge in translating and particularly in scaling diffusion processes. The replication of Urban Living Labs structures is itself a challenging and questionable process, since contextual conditions vary (Lucas Smas ; Andrew Karvonen; Kes Mccormick, personal communication, 2020) and an exact replication of a lab’s structures might lead to two main failures of an experiment, to begin with a false reading of the results and later on a second time a failed sequence of experiments that are strict replications of the initial but in different locales. One form in which replication can be succeeded is by reproducing a product that was successfully tested in real-life conditions such as in the case of the “New light in Alby” project, were the typology of lights produced in a specific pathway in the area was also used partly in other parts of Alby after a positive reception by the local residents through surveys conducted (Karlsson et.al, 2016). In terms of a potential replication of this lighting pattern in other municipalities beyond Botkyrka, this could contribute long-term to environmental sustainability through an energy efficient pattern used in the context of urban renewal (Karlsson et.al, 2016). In the case of “Shape your world”, “Boodla” on the other hand was an actor that aided in the scaling up of the project in Alby by utilizing knowledge and know how in new projects on youth participation initiated by this social entrepreneur (Anja Karlsson, personal communication, 2020 ; demokratiodling, 2017) Another process of replication can be observed in the case of the “Malmö Innovation Platform”, or Hållbarheten knowledge can be reproduced and its application can carefully be replicated and adapted in new experiments through the processes of training and education of related actors and the transferring of gained knowledge. Andrew Karvonen (2020) emphasizes on the role of the individual in becoming the carrier of significant knowledge that is generated within an experimental niche where local innovation takes place. Professional who are part of the shaping of an Urban Living Lab, whether these are professional planners, cultural managers, business partners or have affiliations with the academia, can play an important role in the transmission of knowledge and know-how from one local lab to another, by adapting knowledge previously generated to the existing contextual reality. The scaling up of existing experiments is perhaps one of the most prominent and important functions of an Urban Living Lab. At the same time it poses as a dark area in the ULL research, as the
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
specific mechanisms through which local niche experiments can be scaled up still remain unclear. Von Wirth et.al (2019) distinguishes two main strategies that contribute to the scaling up of Urban Living Labs, the “stimulation of entrepreneurial growth” and the “narratives of impacts”. Stimulating entrepreneurial growth refers to the “scaling up” of business models deriving from a single niche experiment. However one can argue that this strategy refers to very specific types of Urban Living Labs and does not apply to all typologies previously discussed. This is the main reason why this strategy takes place in the “Hållbarheten” project where a leading actor is an energy company that seeks effective business models based on the concept of energy efficiency. The strategy referred to by von Wirth et.al as “Narratives of Impact” concerns two main practices that can also be observed in the structure and outcome of the five cases of Urban Living Labs under study. “Narratives of Impact” is about a process of continuous storytelling about alternative futures that stem from the scope of an Urban Living Lab. What is more, this strategy is connected the process of creating what von Wirth et.al (2019) describe as “the bigger narrative”, in other words, the generation of images of the future that create a bigger picture or frame. And hereby lays greatly the notion of transformation in the concept of Urban Living Labs. They create in real life conditions images of the future that are tested and reproduced. The scaling up of an Urban Living Lab is different than the process of replication in the sense that replication mostly refers to the reproduction of the structures of an experiment, while scaling up is used to describe the process of the reproduction of the bigger picture created that does not only apply to the context of an Urban Living Lab. However, this view can be contrary to how other authors perceive these processes such as in the case of Steen and van Bueren (2017) who consider replication as a sub-process of the scaling up of an Urban Living Lab. I some way, all the above Urban Living Labs present with narratives of impact as they create and exchange stories about alternative urban practices, however none of them have managed to contribute to reproducing an image of the future beyond the local scale. One can argue that some initial form of broader change was succeeded in the case of the “Malmö Innovation Platform”. The process of scaling up an experiment or an innovation that is the outcome of an experiment is not only about creating these images of the future. This can be understood in the context of the notion of “transition”. Going back to the core of this concept, Rotman & Loorbach (2010) recognize the importance of the role of co-evolution of economic, cultural, technological, ecological and institutional developments which occur at different scale-levels. It is also about the reproduction of the generated visions across different fields, levels of governance and contexts of norms.. The scaling of experiments has been identified as an important mechanism that generates transformation, and thus researchers are now called upon to uncover tangible mechanisms that enhance transformative processes.
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Scaling up is not only about creating the image of the future-about reproduction is different contexts and different scale levels. In that way the diffusion processes of Urban Living Labs can allow them to grow exponentially through time and space becoming major nodes in the sustainability transition practices. The diffusion processes and especially the one of the scaling up of an experiment can be seen as drivers of urban experimentation through the living lab method of practice in the field of urban development, as seen in Figure 11. The diffusion processes of embeddedness, translation and scaling can generate long term projects and initiatives that grow beyond the defined spatial and contextual boundaries of a locale.
Figure 11: Graph visualization approach to the diffusion processes of Urban living Labs Source: Karvonen, Lecture (2020) ; own edit
4.2. The limits of Urban Living Labs- Difficulties, drawbacks and risks in their implementation
A main problematic with the concept of Urban Living Labs derives from their framing itself. They imply a very broad agenda linked to urban transitions with an unclear normative aim. In a sense it is not clear who can make use of ULLs, for what means, and to which end. The whole concept can undergo various interpretations and thus, a very complex landscape is formed, where utilizers, partners and users struggle to navigate and define their own roles. What is more, it is not clear enough whether Urban Living Labs encourage normative change or abet maintenance of a business-as-usual pattern of decision making and development trajectory. An example of this is the discussion on whether the integration of ULLs as a
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
local governance tool can foster a re-emerging strengthened public-led urban planning and development strategies or if it promotes the continuation of the prevailing market-oriented planning course. Lucas Smas (personal communication, 2020) insisted that depending on how and for what aim ULLs are used it could be both. This signals that as ULLs do not bare a single definition, in a similar manner their aim changes depending on the goals of the utilizers and/or the partners as the users might not have a significant say in the process. Another uncertainty deriving from the name of the concept is related to the environment of experimentation. The notion of Laboratory implies a protected or even “sterile” environment for experimentation, but at the same time literature on Urban Living Labs explicitly relates them with experimentation in real-life-conditions. This element of embededdness in real space and time is what attaches to the concept of ULLs a normative identity. If experimentation were to occur in a protected environment then the results would not be the same. However, since the linguistic aspects of the concept makes it open for interpretation a risk remains, that Urban Living Labs will become an ambiguous term that will lose its original meaning and thus applicability for complex urban situations (Schmitt et.al, 2016). A great concern comes with the notions of the “politics of experimentation” (Evans, Karvonen & Raven, 2016), in other words who is allowed to take part in co-creation through Urban Living Labs. As one can observe in the case of the “Experiment Stockholm” project, the lack of participation of non- professionals in the co-creation process had clear impacts for the outcomes of the project. On the other hand, when citizen participation is sought, it is almost never obvious how the citizen who can take part in participatory processes is defined in the first place. In relation to the communicative planning and its own deficits3, Urban Living Labs might lead into the same trap, not recognizing power relationships, domination, inclusion and exclusion patterns that are developed within a specific locale, and instead of dealing with conflicts effectively, create and reproduce more conflicting situations (Schmitt et.al, 2016). A further concern emerges when discussing the aftermaths- or what comes after an Urban Living Lab. The evaluation of an Urban Living Lab project comes with two main challenges. The first one relates to the funding opportunities for that particular stage of the project which is usually less compared to the initial stages (Urban Europe, 2018). This means that less time and means is devoted to evaluating the results from a project and its real-life impacts. Furthermore, the need to justify the financial resources allocated towards a project sometimes can lead to the recognition of mostly the positive outcomes of a project and less emphasis to be paid on the shortcomings. The result from this is that in many cases an overrated positive image of an Urban Living Lad is depicted, leading to a sense of over enthusiasm over the concept and creating greater expectations and a false image of the boundaries of an experiment. One such boundary relates to the degree of citizens’ participation. Urban Living Labs cannot be seen as a
3 Referred to in the Theoretical framework chapter (chapter 3)
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
panacea for enhancing and establishing increased inclusion in urban development processes, however they have the capacity to open up new channels for communication and participation (Lucas Smas, personal communication, 2020). The second challenge relates back to the diffusion processes of Urban Living Labs discussed earlier. A big question regarding the transformative capacity of Urban Living Labs relates to the potential of the scaling of an experiment, or the incorporation of the knowledge created through this experimental environment in different scales of policy-making, strategies and related activities (Urban Europe, 2018 & Andrew Karvonen, personal communication, 2020). Finally Andrew Karvonen (personal communication, 2020) argues that Urban Living Labs can possibly trigger uneven development. Some areas seem to be more eager to develop projects by implementing a living lab methodology while in others this concept has not been implemented at all. Taking a step back and considering this on a larger scale, one could observe a fragmented urban landscape of uneven developmental expectations even between neighborhoods. What could be described as “the end of the era of comprehensive planning” that initiates a more locally focused pattern of development could possibly trigger greater spatial inequalities within a city or community.
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5. Urban Living Labs and the role of local administrations and planners
The present chapter is engaged with analyzing the role of two main categories of actors who are usually involved in the organization and the establishment of urban experiments and related practices. Local administrations and Planners, as well as their interrelated occupations are discussed beyond the Swedish context, but at the same time, the findings also apply to it especially when discussing the role of local administrations. Drawing from the related bibliography on the topic what is sought is a more theoretical approach to the role of these two main categories of actors in the context of Urban Living Labs.
5.1. Urban Living Labs and the local administration
Cities and their administrations are nowadays in a state of constantly reinventing themselves in order to adapt to rapid changes. Hajer (2016) identifies three main factors as to why local administrations seek experimental and innovative ways to address contemporary issues. One of the foremost is the “New Public Management” doctrine and the commercialization of decision-making processes as a response to bureaucracy. However, as Hajer points out, running a city as a business can generate democratic deficits. What is more, the localization of national agencies and services as a means to cut-down on the national budget gave local governments more responsibilities and challenges to be met. Finally, the rise of the ICT sector and digital governance has signified a different governance path for cities as they are losing more and more of their traditional tools and channels of decision-making which are now outsourced. In Sweden, the transition from government to governance can be translated as the process of moving from a centralized government to a more interactive approach (Andersson et.al, 2018). This is sought through the exploration of new emerging modes of governance. In the European Union policy context, Living Labs were first introduced in 2006, after the Finnish European Presidency founded the European Network of Living Labs (ENoll) as a means for creating open-
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
innovation environments. The evolution of the concept of Living Labs and Urban Living Labs, initially focused on testing new smart technologies for resource-efficiency in real-life urban environments. The transition from government to governance created a new environment and new opportunities for utilizing Urban Living Labs and has led to the practical and political need and urgency of cities to transform their governance framework towards a more inclusive direction (Mccormick et. al, 2018). Naumann et. al (2018) explicitly relate the processes of innovation through experimentation, with the quest for defining new forms of governance arrangements. Urban Living Labs thus can be seen as both spaces and processes through which new modes of governance are explored and tested beyond a monocentric government approach of the urban realm (Hodson et.al. 2016). In 2007, the directives of the “Leipzig Charter on Sustainable European Cities”, a document drafted by the Member States’ Ministers responsible for Urban Development. It indicated a more integrated approach to urban development and created a legislative framework for the establishment of the Living Lab principles and main thematics in the European context, such as the need for the modernization of urban infrastructure and improvement of energy efficiency. The document emphasized on the need for integrated urban policies stressing the importance of involving a variety of stakeholders. For Voytenko, McCormick and Evans (2018), Urban Living Labs are unbreakable components of urban governance. They define them as forms of experimental governance for urban sustainability, thus leaving no doubt for their understanding of where they contribute although highlighting that the role to be played is still to be determined. Smas (2016) similarly links the concept of Urban Living Labs with governance, labeling the concept as a form of “soft urban governance mode” beyond conventional government practices. He defines them as an experimental form of urban governance and then goes on to identify four main characteristics that define them; co-creation, exploration, experimentation and evaluation. Being more explicit on how the above principles are achieved, he explicitly raises an important issue regarding the users of ULLs that facilitate co-creation. For Lucas Smas, alike Chroneer et. al (2018), citizens are prioritized before other local actors and co-creation is succeeded through inclusive, participatory and do-it –yourself (DIY) activities. As discussed previously, Urban Living Labs bring forth and generate a broad landscape of synergies between different actors of the urban arena. Those synergies depend on various factors, such as the purpose of an ULL or the scale of interventions. One major actor whose role emerges enhanced, particularly when discussing the “civic” Urban Living Labs typology (McCormick & Hartmann, 2017), is the municipality. Municipalities represent the local legitimate level of government. Steen and Van Bueren (2017) consider municipalities as a vital actor of the Urban Living Lab framework along with users, private actors and knowledge institutes, in a quadruple helix approach to an experimental governance
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
framework. In the case of the quintuple helix model for innovation, municipalities can be considered as parts of the public sector circle, as demonstrated in Figure 12.
Figure 12: The local administration as part of the public sector section of the quintuple helix model. Source: Carayannis & Campbell (2014); own edit
Municipalities have the capacity to become important nodes in transition governance initiatives, and instruments that generate innovation but one can assume that this is highly dependent on the context of the different planning systems around the world and the power structures and relations that derive from an existing governance structure. System innovation as analyzed by Andersson et. al (2018), relates to the shifting role of government and its relation to its surrounding environment through a cross- sectoral approach. Urban Living Labs bare a certain capacity to generate innovation, however one major challenge as highlighted by Bulekley et. al (2016) refers to the existing of social and material practices and networks that are created through configurations of power and that a main precondition for ULLs to move past the sole role of research nodes they would need to challenge those structures. Bearing this in mind, it is understood that transitions in the role of local governments cannot be radical but a smooth passage from one regime to another might be a more realistic approach (Andersson et. al , 2018). Kronsell and Mukhtar-Landgren (2018) distinguish four main typologies local governments’ role in the implementation of Urban Living Labs framework: the municipality as “promoter”, the municipality as a “partner”, the municipality as “enabler” and finally as having a “non-role”. The role of the promoter refers to the capacity and the will of local governments to initiate conditions for the participation of multiple actors and to decide on the allocation of resources for the above purpose. When municipalities act as promoters they tend to take the initiative for organizing platforms of collaborative governance. This indicates a high degree of leadership. The Urban Living Labs initiated in Alby fall under this categorization, as Botkyrka municipality actively took part organizing the network of the actors that took part and at the same time was part of the funding scheme. When municipalities operate as partners in Urban Living Labs they tend to share the initiative and the leadership while local governments obtain a specific role within
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
the collaborative scheme. The enabler role reflects an aspect where although municipalities create the preconditions and provide space for initiating experimental and collaborative processes, they abstain from taking part in it or have a limited participations and certainly not a leading role as in the two previous conditions. One example for this is in the case of Hållbarheten in Malmö and Malmö Innovation pLatform, where the municipality provided the building for experimentation. In some cases, the municipalities can abstain from the performance of Urban Living Labs and this might occur for various reasons related to jurisdiction, unwillingness, political conditions and challenges such as short-term leadership cycles (Naumann et. al, 2018) or the contextual planning framework such as in cases when the national level bares more responsibility on spatial interventions than the municipal. In the case of “Experiment Stockholm”, the municipalities that took part can be considered as partners among other actors who are involved in the development of the region of Stockholm (Färgfabriken, 2015). The role of the “partner” implies a shared degree of leadership in the collaborative scheme initiated, participating on equal terms, as they contributed to the funding scheme. Finally their function and role was demonstrated through the participation of professional planners who also had a chance to reflect on their own part as proactive practitioners within a partnership.
5.2. The role of the planner in Urban Living Labs
After discussing the role of local administrations in the context of urban experimentation, questions are born in relation to the role of urban planners, and more specifically, what is the mission of urban planners amidst this new landscape of actor relation in urban governance? The answer is the have a significant role to play in this new constellation of networks but this varies. A planner could be working in the local administration or the private sector but there are significant role overlaps as observed in 5.2.1 and 5.2.2. The present study distinguishes three main typologies of planners’ roles: (i) facilitators (ii) advisors (iii) storytellers.
5.2.1. Planners as facilitators and enablers of Urban Living Labs
This role is connected with the typology of civic-oriented Urban Living Labs, where the municipalities act as enablers and in many cases providers of urban experimentation. In this typology, municipality planners act as city representatives. In this way, they take part in the organizing and establishing of the concept. The work of urban planners who act as city representatives entails three main tasks according to Juujärvi and Pesso (2013).
(i) Generating a common vision and allocating the necessary resources with the aim of its achievement.
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
(ii) The provision of strategic leadership and the coordination of efforts between the different actors who are part of the co-creation scheme. (iii) The promotion of networking and the responsibility of generating new and more inclusive networks among actors.
The above directions indicate a strong coordinating role on the part of urban planners work in relation to local municipal administration. This is maybe the most common role of planners in a framework where municipalities have increased planning power such as in the Swedish planning context. In the case when municipalities are in charge of organizing and conducting urban experiments, it falls upon planners and city officials to have the responsibility of coordinating efforts. In other words, as Innes & Booher (2014) highlight, planners are responsible of bringing together different actors in communicative activities by becoming the responsible agents for shaping a network. In the context of a local administration, one can observe an increased responsibility that falls upon planners as they become central players in the organization and facilitation of Urban Living Labs. In the context of sustainability transitions in urban governance, urban planners in local administration become central agents of public institutional-led change. One way in which planners become important agents of change is by integrating more actors in the process (Thiel et.al, 2016) and ensuring an inclusive stakeholder environment, while at the same time retaining an ethos where this does not intrude with the wanted aim of a project (Jonas Bylund, personal communication, 2020). One example of this is the integration of residents or groups of residents’ whose voices are usually not heard in development processes. What is described here is the integration of different residents’ perspectives and it is on the planners’ capacities to identify new channels through which local governments can communicate more with citizens in issues of spatial planning and development. Identifying new channels of communication and participation as well as ways of responding to the input of citizens (Thiel et.al, 2016) is central to the process of empowerment of different groups of residents. Apart from the roles described above, planners in the context of local administration act as intermediates between the different actors who participate in an Urban Living Lab environment and have the role of conveying information within the network generated. Conveying information can be a challenging task, as it can lead to the distortion of the original information to be conveyed and generate more problems than intended to solve. Thus, the role of the intermediate between different levels and actors of urban governance as well as between local governments and residents is in many cases problematic (Anna Bolinder, personal communication, 2019).
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5.2.2. Planners as advisors-consultants
The previous decades have given rise to the operation of various international organizations and private initiatives in the field of urban development. The private sector is an unbreakable fragment of the quadruple and the quintuple helix model, usually referred to as “industry” (see Figure 13). Industry operates within a certain environment and constantly interacts with the public sector, the academia and the civil society.
Figure 13: The quintuple helix and the position of industry. Source: Carayannis & Campbell (2014); own edit
In the context of Urban Living Labs, the private sector becomes a significant actor with various roles, the most outstanding of which is the facilitator the partner or user in urban experimentation initiatives. Private actors, such as companies with private interests and organizations can be local or international partners in Urban Living Lab public-private schemes (Steen & van Bueren, 2017) as seen in the case of the “Hållbarheten” Urban Living Lab. The role of the private sector is significant in these actor constellations, considering the fact that private companies and organizations in many cases provide a great proportion of the funding behind the implementation of Urban living Lab projects (Lucas Smas, personal communication, 2020). However, beside that, they also provide useful “know-how” and valuable experience (Steen & van Bueren, 2017). This know-how can be demonstrated through planners who are employed by private companies and organizations as planning and development consultants, project managers, resource managers and other occupations. Heurkens and Hobma (2014) label planners in the private sector as “market actors” who commit themselves to the projects they uptake. But this commitment lies within the scope and goals of one project and the devotion to all aspects of sustainability cannot rest upon the social-corporate responsibility as Heurkens and Hobma indicate. Planners as consultants are involved in various stages of projects including the ones resembling Urban Living Labs in three main ways according to Linovski (2019) : (i) by generating policy reviews, (ii)
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
creating long-term strategies and plans and (iii) developing public engagement plans and strategies. As one can observe, the roles of planners as consultants of urban development in the context of Urban Living Labs does not significantly change from the role that was described in the previous section of “planners as facilitators and enablers of Urban Living Labs”. Planners in both conditions can work as the developers of networks, ensuring inclusiveness and a wide stakeholder engagement. The difference is that they work with different perspectives, the one of the public sector and the one of the private. However it can still be the case that planners collaborate simultaneously with both the private and the public sector in the shaping of an Urban Living Lab, or several of them in the context of a wider international project.
5.2.3. Planners as storytellers
"If you listen carefully, at the end you'll be someone else." ~ Vyasa
At this point a final role of planners in the context of Urban Living Labs is discussed, in the light of sustainability transitions and urban experimentation and this is the planners’ role as successful storytellers. It can be argued that this aspect of the planers’ role is maybe the most significant and the most likely to contribute to significant transformation as this will be discussed below. Before jumping in, there needs to be a brief introduction to the concept of storytelling in planning. James A. Throgmorton (1996 ; 2003) recognizes planning beyond its conventional practice, as a form of constitutive and persuasive storytelling about the future of places. In order for this process to be established, these narratives have to be enriched with real-life settings and situations that include the recognition of power dynamics and situations of conflict that demonstrate the complexity of dealing with challenging spatial issues. The real life settings of a story add to the power of persuasion. But according to Throgmorton, stories also have to be constitutive and this means that they have a normative aim of establishing new frameworks and generating new ideas that flow within and between networks. Sandercock (2003), in agreement with this view of Throgmorton on storytelling also discusses it as a normative planning tool that can become a driver for change. Storytelling can be seen as both a model of planning and at the same time a model for planning (van Hulst, 2012). Urban Planning already uses many forms of storytelling, one of which is planning documents that are used to broadly convey information. On the other hand, storytelling can also be used as a tool for the improvement of planning practice itself. The latter case is a main tool that can be promoted through Urban Living Labs for innovation that operate in the local context. But if planning is strongly connected to the process of storytelling, what becomes of the planners role? Charles Hoch (1996; in Hillier & Healy, 2008), determines that planning theorists can become
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efficient storytellers of practice in a continuous dialogues with planning practitioners. However, one can argue that also practitioners can embrace the concept of storytelling and reconstruct their own narratives based on their experiences gained in real-life settings. In the context of Urban Living Labs, storytelling can become an essential and unbreakable mechanism of the diffusion processes that lead to the scaling up or scaling across of urban experiments. This can relate to what Andy Karvonen (Lecture, 2020) described as “individuals who carry experimental knowledge”. These individuals can be the urban planners who as practitioners, whether they have ties to the public or the private sector take part in the formulation and implementation of projects that resemble urban experiments in the form of Urban Living Labs. Storytellers can also belong to the two previously discussed typologies of planners in Urban Living Labs projects. Planners have the ability to tell stories, not only about visions and images of the future but also about their own experiences. These experiences can relate to their past engagement with urban experimentation and the lessons gained from their involvement in Urban Living Lab projects. Urban planners thus can exercise their skills of communicating stories across networks and this trait can be used to enhance processes of narratives transmission across intra-local networks of knowledge. This process is connected to the strategy of “narratives of impact” that was described in section 4.2.4 “An analysis of the case studies”. Storytellers act as the seeds of knowledge that generate new experiments across networks. Storytelling and its connection to the methodology of Urban Living Labs is already being recognized by major actors who work with the facilitation and networking around the concept as well as its promotion, such as the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL, 2019). Storytelling pre-requires the creation of networks. Without networks to convey knowledge and findings from local Urban Living Lab projects, then this information reaches no further recipient outside the locale and the findings have no external impact. Thus, the diffusion process of scaling up the experiment cannot be completed and the transformative capacity of an Urban Living Lab is reduced. Storytelling can become a model for Urban Living Labs, and at the same time a political tool that is used to persuade decision-makers and empower citizens (Rojas, 2018; Tsiviltidou, 2013; Poplin et.al, 2017; Nah et.al, 2015 ; Certomà et.al, 2017). On the other hand, this aspect of storytelling can come under dispute as it can be used to promote agendas or only certain sides of stories (van Hulst, 2012). This demonstrates the power that storytelling entails and at the same time the caution needed when employing this tool as a mechanism to promote urban experimentation beyond a single project in the local scale.
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6. The role of citizens in Urban Living Labs
“There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about” Margaret J. Wheatley
Much has been discussed about the role of co-creation and its importance in the context of Urban Living Labs. Previously in this section of the report there was a look into the role of municipalities in relation to experimental processes, but what is yet to be examined is the role of another main urban actor, that of the citizen and its role and contribution in a transitioning sustainability framework and an integrated actor collaborative environment. Citizens however refer to a very broad spectrum of urban residents and thus, the involvement of all these stakeholders in an Urban Living Lab might prove a challenging, even impossible task for the enablers of such processes. The word “Living” in the context of Urban Living Labs brings forth the idea that engaging with real-life conditions in the urban context dictates that citizens cannot be left out of the picture (Andrew Karvonen, personal communication, 2020; Baccarne et.al, 2014; 2016). Citizens are essential and unbreakable integral parts of the urban environment and experimentation in the city and this requires their consideration as a constant variable. As seen in Figure 14, citizens as non professional people can be considered parts of the civic society which presents with a broad spectrum within the quintuple helix model for innovation.
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Figure 14: Citizens are positioned within the “civic society ellipse” in the model of the quintuple helix. Source: Carayannis & Campbell (2014) ; own edit
6.1. Civic participation in Urban Living Labs and Arnstein’s “Ladder”
Nesti (2018) defines several modes of citizens’ roles in experimental contexts. To begin with, she identifies citizens as being part of a broader categorization of urban actors, those referred to as “lay actors” and usually are members of the society outside of governmental or non-governmental actors (those referred to as state actors) and usually produce a service or good. State and lay actors can be engaged in a co-productive process, in various stages and in different ways. In the context of experimentation through an Urban Living Lab approach, citizens can be engaged according to Nesti as volunteers in various stages of the innovation process. Citizens can also become essential components of an Urban Living Lab both as partners and users of the ULL content (Chroneer et.al, 2018 ; Juujärvi & Pesso, 2013). On the other hand citizens are not necessarily a prerequisite for an initiative to be framed under the banner of an Urban Living Lab. In various cases, citizens or residents are not included in the related processes, or are included in ways that do not essentially promote active engagement in stages of the project that can affect its overall course and progress. A common way various scholars study and evaluate citizen participation in the context of urban Living Labs is by employing Arnstein’s model of the “ladder of citizen participation” (Voytenko et. al, 2008 ; Pappers et. al, 2020 ; Steen & Van Bueren, 2017 ). Arnstein (1969), frames citizen participation as the cornerstone for democracy and a necessary component in every democratic society. The ladder of citizen participation (see Figure 15) refers to a simplified model resembling a ladder that encompasses eight different modes of citizen participation and attempts to frame in an illustrative way the different ways citizens can be empowered (or not) through participation in the development of a plan or program. The degrees of participation range from the non-participation modes of “manipulation” and “therapy” to
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degrees of “tokenism” to the forms of citizens’ high empowerment: “partnership”, “delegated power” and “citizen control”. Arnstein’s model might be a simplification of different ways in which citizens are included in planning processes, however it can be relevant today in the Urban Living Lab context when attempting to investigate not only who but also how one participates and what this means for a normative transition-oriented goal.
Figure 15: Arnstein’s model of the “Ladder of Citizen Participation”. Source: Arnstein, 1969 ; own edit
It is important at this point to take a look back into the categorization of Urban Living Labs as strategic, civic and organic. In each of these typologies, the role of the citizen varies and so does the degree of participation. A higher degree of normative oriented participation is expected to be met at the latter two typologies of civic and organic (or grassroot) Urban Living Labs however this is not always the case especially with civic ULLs. The main difference from the organic typology is that in civic ULLs. Citizens have the capacity to act mostly as users or partners, while in the organic or grassroots ones; they can act as partners or even enablers. It would seem like in organic ULLs, the potential of citizens to actively engage towards a transformative direction is easier to achieve than in the case of civic ULLs, however a typology does not have a universal application, neither can it be replicated the same way in various different locales, thus one ought to be more cautious before making a generalization that one typology offers more to citizen participation than others. One can argue that civic ULLs have the capacity to generate tangible transformative change due to a municipality’s higher degree of legitimization compared to actions led by citizens or other civic organizations. However again, this highly depends on local contextual factors. Citizens in Urban Living Labs have the capacity to generate collective community learning on local sustainability issues (Astbury & Bulkeley, 2018). However it is not always the case that citizens are willing to be part of Urban Living Labs. And that is mainly because of the same reason why it is not easy to achieve wide citizen participation in general even if this is the wanted outcome. Because most people
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don’t have the time and energy in their daily lives to be parts of urban experiments and experimental decision-making processes (Andrew Karvonen, personal communication, 2020). There needs to be more incentives with the goal of making people depart from a while from their daily routines and obligations and devote time and energy in participatory processes. Should citizens be part of an Urban Living Lab as users, it is an important prerequisite το examine the stage in which they are inserted in the process (Kes Mccormick, personal communication, 2020). This is also the case with citizen participation in urban development processes in general, as most of it takes place during the implementation phase of projects and this also occurs in the case of Urban Living Labs implementation (Menny et.al, 2018). The earlier citizens are included in the planning processes, the more capacity exists to generate adequate results from their participation, as citizens can actively influence and shape co-creation processes rather than being passive respondents to an ULL process (Menny et.al, 2018) A major problematic with citizen participation, which also applies in the case of Urban Living Labs, is that of the limits of participation. A large number of participants might do more harm than benefit a deliberative process. Large, uncontrolled number of participants might inhibit and reproduce conflict that prohibits productive co-creation. This means that not everyone can be heard. However what can be sought in an Urban Living Lab environment is all perspectives to be heard (Kes Mccormick, pesronal communication, 2020). Perspectives can represent groups that share a common view and goals regarding a specific spatially-represented issue, as in an ULL framework. The need for the representation of perspectives comes with a prerequisite, the acknowledgement and recognition of different groups of perspectives. Once the leading actors of an Urban Living Lab are able to make this distinction between different or diverse perspectives, then the foundations for a more fruitful dialogue and deliberation process are set. In this case, what becomes a new challenge is considering which individuals can represent the different perspectives. Anja Karlsson (personal communication, 2020), also pointed out a main problematic regarding participation when discussing about the Urban Living Labs in Alby. This concerns the element of “trust”. Communication channels between residents and other ULL actors rely on trust that requires a significant amount to build and at the same time, it remains extremely fragile. But trust also relates to the relationships between all the other actors that are part of an ULL project or a network of projects.
6.2. The results of the surveys on citizen participation in the context of urban experimentation
As a prerequisite to further examining the potential of citizen participation in the context of Urban Living Labs, two pilot surveys were conducted. The first survey concerned residents of Norrtalje
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municipality. To begin with, it has to be explained why this municipality was chosen to perform that kind of survey. Norrtälje municipality (Kommun), is a municipality of Stockholm County that lies to the north of Stockholm. It is the municipality with the largest area in the County extending for 201 535 acres. Of this area, the majority approximately 53% is characterized as productive forest land, thus signifying the ecological importance and the natural character of the municipality. Norrtalje municipality is populated by approximately 61769 (Statistics Sweden, 2018). In the autumn of 2019, through a university course project4 the students were given the chance to participate in dialogue processes with municipality officials regarding urban planning processes and conduct surveys with residents of the municipality in relation to place identity, the main challenges of the municipality and issues at stake as well as participation. Two main conclusions that are interesting in the light of the current topic were drawn in the period of the above project.
(i) The municipality wants to adopt a strategy to open up new channels of communication between the municipality’s planning office and the residents of the municipality’s different communities (ii) The residents of the municipality share a strong sense of place and community identity and engage in dialogue processes regarding everyday as well as challenging issues which concern their communities.
The two points made above were the main reason why Norrtalje was chosen as a municipality to initially examine the potential of Urban Living Labs methodology implementation. What is more, the municipality’s planners were not familiar with the concept of Urban Living Labs and how it has been tested and put into practice in other Swedish Municipalities, such as in Botkyrka or Malmo. Urban Living Labs have not been considered by the municipality as an umbrella concept for a sequence of actions and urban planning processes, and thus the municipality poses as a bare test-ground for assessing the potentials of urban user-ended experimentation. At this point the aim is to examine closer the “Living” component of Urban Living Labs, in other words the people who can be potential users. The survey aims to examine the users’ attitude in two manners. The first concerns their perception of and stance towards the environment of Urban Living Labs and the second their perception of the activities that ULL’s can entail in order to create a framework for wider and more essential participation. Keeping the above in
4 AG2129 HT19-1 Project Sustainable Urban Planning - Strategies for Urban and Regional Development.KTH Royal Institute of Tec hnology
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mind the first survey was structured in a specific manner in order to examine the residents’ response to issues of spatial planning and participation in their community and municipality.
Chart 1: Participation in dialogue processes or other forms of participation processes over the development of a plan within the municipality5
2%
6%
Yes No No answer
92%
The majority of the participants in the pilot stated that they have never participated in any form of dialogue or participation process in relation to a development plan or project within the Municipality. Three main assumptions can be drawn from this answer. (i) That the municipality has not initiated a wide dialogue process and has only reached out to specific and limited groups of residents (ii) That the municipality has initiated communication processes however has not yet discovered effective channels of communication to convey the message and (iii) That the residents have not responded to the municipality’s calls for various reasons such as lack of time to be part of these processes, or a high amount of trust in how the authorities deal with urban development in Norrtalje. The main conclusion regarding this first chart is that the vast majority of the residents asked have never been part of participation processes but it is still to be determined whether this is because of their own choice not to be part or the municipality’s attitude towards public participation in planning processes.
5 All the questions of the pilots where formed in Swedish and are translated to English in this section. Their original form of the questions can be found in Appendix 2.
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Chart 2: Can residents who do not have a professional expertise in the field of urban planning and development contribute to issues of local sustainability?
2%
2% 11% Yes No Maybe I don’t know 85%
The response to the above question of whether residents with non-professional expertise can contribute to local sustainability of their communities is of importance for assessing peoples’ response towards the concept of user-ended urban experimentation. It signifies an important initiating point in the Living Lab way of working and especially when it comes to peoples’ role within the concept. As the survey demonstrated, most residents who took part in the pilot, do believe that they have the ability to have a say in matters of spatial interest within their communities, as “experts of their own experiences”, as seen in chart 2. This also signifies a departing point for their attitude towards the fundamental logic behind the concept of Urban Living Labs in terms of users’ participation.
Chart 3 & 4: (i) who is the most effective governance sector in generating sustainable solutions to various urban challenges? (ii) Is the private sector alone capable of ensuring and securing issues of public interest?
7% Public Yes 23% Sector 20% 17% 45% Private No Sector Maybe 32% Other 56% I don’t know
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The answers to the above questions pose a significant interest since they in a certain degree demonstrate the public’s opinion towards which sector is capable of ensuring sustainable solutions to issues of public interest. To begin with, the majority of the respondents still perceive the public sector as the most capable entity that provides with sustainable solutions, although it has to be recognized that many also place their trust in the private sector. This might also be the outcome of the preservation of a strong element of trust in the role of public institutions in the country. However when it comes to the question of who is capable of ensuring the public interest, people clearly don’t solely place their trust in the private sector and this is in line with the latter response. What conclusion can be drawn from this is that the respondents to the survey don’t believe that only one type of actor can provide with efficient solutions to spatial issues and conditions. The above answers point towards the capacity of the public sector, expressed in the local level through municipalities to facilitate activities that can fall under the umbrella of urban experimentation through the concept of Urban Living Labs. Chart 5: Do you believe that collaborations between residents, municipalities, associations, researchers (universities) and companies can create better conditions for sustainable solutions than when they work individually?
7% 2% 9% Yes No Maybe 82% I don’t know
A key element of Urban Living Labs is the multi-actor engagement in co-creation processes as a precondition for achieving a wider accepted and more sustainable outcome. The vast majority of the respondents of the pilot seem to agree with the implementation of such collaborative schemes of governance in the urban arena. This answer is in agreement with the previous ones displayed in chart 3 and 4, from which one can observe the view that not one sector or actor alone can be responsible for processes of urban development.
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Chart 6: Do you believe that a broader (cross-sectoral) cooperation in urban development decision- making processes can increase the conditions for equality and justice?
4% 11%
Yes No Maybe 85%
Equity and justice are two notions that are being more and more discussed and addressed in relation to issues of urban planning and development. The vast majority of the pilot respondents assume that the generation of collaborative schemes between different sectors and their actors has the capacity to produce more equitable and just results. This can be achieved by including more perspectives in the process from more actors who take part in these schemes. However this does not imply that a broader collaboration is directly related to improved equity and justice results and this is the reason why the above question was framed in this manner (“increase the conditions for equity and justice”). Provided that the wanted and preferred outcome of urban development is directed towards an equitable and just result, then the structure of Urban Living Labs might have the capacity to point towards that direction, even if this can only be achieved in the long run and under certain conditions such as an effective scaling- up of lab structures.
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Chart 7: Do you believe that urban experiments should give priority to the role and participation of residents in the decision-making process or broader collaboration between, for example, residents, officials, politicians, companies, associations and other of civil society actors?
7% 18% The role of citizens Broader Collaborations I don’t know 75%
Chart 7 indicates what Jonas Bylund (personal communication, 2020) also highlighted, that the concept of Urban Living Labs cannot be seen as a mere demonstration. The majority of the respondents believe that urban experimentation should prioritize wide actor-collaboration schemes rather than only promoting and demonstrating wider citizen participation.
Chart 8: If you were invited to participate together with the municipality and others, such as associations, universities, companies, to participate in workshops on alternative forms of decision making around a plan or urban development project (experiment as above), how likely are you to participate?
17% Very Likely 26% Likely
22% Maybe Not as likely 35%
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Chart 9: How do you perceive participating in a “hands-on” manner in the development or shaping of the physical environment in your district, for example by creating a park or plantings, building parts in a playground, participating in art projects, etc.
19% Very positive 26% Positive
2% Negative 2% Very Negative 51% I don’t know
Chart 8 and 9 depart from the previous charts’ logic of assessing the respondents’’ attitude towards the environment and structure of Urban Living Labs and attempt to gain an insight of how people are willing to be parts of these governance collaboration schemes. Chart 8 indicates a very positive attitude towards the possibility of being invited by the municipality to participate in urban governance collaboration schemes. This comes into direct contradiction with the third assumption made in relation to the results from Chart 1, that citizens have no interest or are not available for actively participating when invited to be parts of co-creation processes. Chart 8 demonstrates that the majority of the respondents would be positive or very positive towards being parts of Urban Living Lab-like schemes. The response to question 9 as demonstrated in chart number 9 goes a step beyond and signifies something of great importance in the assessment of peoples’ role in urban experimentation, which is the degree of active involvement. Chart 9 demonstrates that the majority of the residents of Norrtälje municipality who took part in the pilot have a positive or very positive attitude towards actively engaging in the shaping of their urban environment through hands-on activities initiated by the municipality. These activities could be for instance urban gardening as in the example of “Shape your World” Urban Living Lab in Alby, or active involvement in the creation of a neighborhood park, such as a “pocket park”6 or an art exhibition such as in the case of “Exhibition Stockholm” in which case what was missing from the Lab structure was the participation of non-professional people or residents of the area under study. Much of the criticism that the project received was based on the lack of non-professional participants (Smas,
6 Pocket parks are small-scale green spaces that can be created occasionally, on parts of empty or neglected urban land, such as urban voids. Their shape and size depends on the layout of the building blocks and/or the road network of a city. Many Pocket Parks derived from initiatives of collective actions by citizens or social groups through community joint efforts and the involvement of various urban actors (Iliopoulos & Litsardaki, 2020).
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personal communication, 2020). What one can assume from the above response is that people are willing to actively participate in a Living Lab resembling structure of urban governance mode.
One can identify several interesting points from the survey based in Norrtälje municipality. To begin with, there seems to be a great need of the municipality opening up to new modes of urban governance that allows more voices and perspectives to be heard and responded to. Urban Living Labs present with a way forward based on these principles. It would seem that the respondents of the pilot are positive towards not only the structure, aim and means of Urban Living Labs but also towards themselves becoming active agents in the process of urban experimentation. Of course one can object and state that it is difficult to over generalize based on data gathered from a specific locale that bares its own local conditions and particularities, such as in the case of Norrtälje municipality and its residents. The original aim of the second survey7, was to expand the data collection regarding the same questions that are part of the first pilot targeted towards residents of Norrtälje municipality. Thus, the second survey targeted people who live in other Swedish municipalities with the assumption and aim of unraveling a similar pattern in their answers as the first one. It has to be acknowledged though that a comparison cannot be made between different locales and conditions, especially when the sample is not the number anticipated to compare between the two pilots. In addition to this most respondents’ answers in the second pilot are related to municipalities within Stockholm County and thus this does not present with a representative national sample. However, as mentioned some underlying trends are observed between the two pilots and are worth discussing with a certain degree of caution. The vast majority of the respondents of the second survey (76,7%) have also not participated in dialogue processes or other activities initiated by their municipality of reference. Similarities between the two surveys can be observed even more when it comes to the question regarding the potential of non- expert citizens to contribute to local sustainability. Almost the same percentage of respondents agrees that people can be treated as “experts of their experiences”. An interesting response is linked with the question regarding the effectiveness of the different sectors of governance to deliver more sustainable results. The tendency of trusting the dynamics of the public sector, which can be understood as the democratic and bureaucratic function of municipalities (Berglund-Snodgrass & Mukhtar-Landgren, 2019) continues in the second pilot even more enhanced (58,6% of the respondents place their trust in the public sector being able to deliver more sustainable results to urban challenges). Similarities between the responses to the two surveys can also be observed in the following questions regarding the effectiveness of multi-actor collaborations and what this might mean for equity and justice in planning signifying the tendency for a wider belief in the capacities of the public sector as
7 See Appendix 2
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expressed in the local level by the municipalities and their mechanisms. The priority towards schemes of broader actor collaborations is something prioritized in both pilots by the respondents. Although the role of non-professional people is recognized, in peoples’ view it cannot exceed the need for consensus and a commonly defined strategy where all actors’ roles are defined and recognized in the multi-actor constellation that responds to a local sustainability challenge. Finally, what is important to highlight that is demonstrated from the results of the second pilot, is the increased willingness of the respondents to be part of these actor constellations and at the same time the actively be part of spatial referenced action. Two main conclusions can be drawn from the two surveys regarding the attitude of people towards Urban Living Labs and their role in urban experimentation. The first relates to the positive reception of fundamental principles that define Urban Living Labs and these are co-creation through the involvement of a variety of actors and the potentials of the experimental nature of the scope of these co- creation schemes. The responses indicate a high amount of trust in municipalities as facilitators in what would resemble an “enabler-driven” typology of Urban Living Labs. Although people recognize the importance of collaboration and the prioritization of commonly defined strategies to address challenges and opportunities in the local context, they would value an enhanced recognition of their role in co- creation. If one relates this view to Arnstein’s model of “the ladder of citizen participation” as described in 6.1, an observation can be made that there is a willingness to move from the lower steps of the “ladder” that indicate a state of non-participation or degrees of tokenism, towards a more upright direction towards the state of the people becoming partners through co-creation urban governance schemes. Arnstein (1969) places partnership in the upper steps of the ladder, labeling it under the entity of “Citizen Power”, according to his view the highest and ideal form of participation. Arnstein recognizes partnership is the fundamental degree of citizen power and an essential factor to consider when discussing citizen participation in modes of urban governance. As partners, people have the ability to affect decision making through dialogue processes but also by actively involving oneself in the shaping of urban features in the local context of their local community or neighborhood. The responses from the two pilots point towards a certain direction concerning the wanted typology of Urban Living Labs and indicate that also civic- oriented structures of Urban Living Labs are viewed in a positive light and bare significant capacity in relation to enhancing peoples’ participation in aspects of urban development.
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7. Overall discussion and concluding remarks
In discussing the main outcomes of the study, the present chapter takes two main directions. First, it aims to discuss the main findings and offer final thoughts on each section of chapter four, five and six, and on a second note it discussed potential research gaps and directions that future research on the topic could be engaged with.
7.1. Discussion on the main findings
The different epistemological roots as well as the varying foci and ontological connotations of urban experimentation that is sought under this umbrella-concept create a significantly fragmented landscape of Urban Living Lab typologies that from a first sight creates more confusion than intended to solve. The concept of urban experimentation and Urban Living Labs is still widely open to different interpretations regarding the different directions innovation can take under their framework. This is evident through the distinction made by different scholars on the typologies of Urban Living Labs. The “messy” landscape of Urban Living Labs that was described in section “3.4” reflects the complexity and of sustainability problems that are identified in complex systems, such as urban systems. One of the main challenges regarding the implementation of Urban Living Labs is moving beyond a single project and incorporating innovation into wider socio-technical systems. Practitioners and researchers are struggling at the moment to define what comes after Urban Living Labs and at the same time to position themselves within the evolution of the concept and how they can contribute to transition processes through urban experimentation.
7.1.1. Urban Living Labs and the Swedish reality: The importance of practice exchange
In relation to the degree of applicability of Urban Living Labs within the Swedish planning context there are some interesting key-points to consider. To begin with, one must take a step back and consider Urban Living Labs as innovation nodes within broader networks of experimentation and innovation that connect different projects mainly within Europe. Urban Living Labs happen to be a European construction and their response to sustainability transitions framework is connected to the European perspective on sustainability, reflecting the commonly adopted by member states European Union perspective. If one considers the Swedish Urban Living Lab reality as a sub-network of urban experiments situated within a broader network of urban experimentation practices within the European context of urban development, then a clearer image can be created in relation to extent of ULL implementation in Sweden. Urban Living
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Labs are relatively new as a concept, and thus it is still relatively unknown within the local administration planning departments. On the other hand, the basic principles that define Urban Living Labs are not new in the Swedish urban development reality. Co-creation and the integration of a multi-actor perspective as well as a close collaboration between the public and the private sector are integral characteristics of urban planning processes in the local development context of Swedish municipalities. However an organized sub-network of Urban Living Labs that are established in different locales around Sweden is not visible at the moment. As observed through the case study analysis, there are several examples of projects that resemble an Urban Living Lab, however most of these remain single cases and are not embedded within a larger network of initiatives within Sweden and between different locales across municipalities. On the other hand most of these initiatives are parts of international projects and networks between Urban Living Labs in different European countries. These networks share a significant exchange of knowledge and know- how between the different projects. This is not evident however on a national level, which means there is no visible and tangible network of know-how exchange between practices and projects that are implemented within Sweden. Urban Living Labs are implemented as parts of networks on a European level; however as separate and disconnected projects within the national level which bares similarities regarding the planning tradition, norms and practices that are usually related to it. A general observation concerning the diffusion processes and the related strategies there is a clear difficulty of Urban Living Lab projects to engage in processes of scaling up, a process of significant impact for the broader framework of urban transformation especially in the context of governance of sustainability transitions. Regarding other identified diffusion processes of Urban Living Labs, “translation” is mainly expressed through processes of educational practices. “Shape your world” in Alby as well as “Malmö Innovation Platform” can be considered exemplary projects that demonstrate an educational perspective. The strategy of replication however should not be merely understood as “replication of structures”, as this is a challenging and risk containing process as it remains highly contextual. Replication is also about the integration of concepts and sustainability ideals behind Urban Living Lab projects as well as the “living lab” way of working in urban development. Because the knowledge generated by a project mostly “travels” through international networks, the local scale within the national context remains highly disconnected and underinvestigated (see figure 16). This implies notions of uneven development, since some locales that are introduced to the concept through international living lab networks are developed under the principles of this concept, while others are not. Two pathways are formed to address this issue. There is either the need for more extensive networking and project connection on a European (or international) level, or a parallel network of projects and practices should be established, one that runs through each national context. There is a need
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for a parallel network between municipalities within Sweden. The outcome of this could create a denser network of practices that resemble Urban Living Labs and at the same time more exchange of knowledge and research outcomes that could produce significant results in the field of urban sustainability transitions and lead to greater transformations on the local urban governance context, as demonstrated in Figure 17.
Figure 16: The networks of the “CASUAL”, “SbUrbanLab” and the “GUST” projects; own edit
Figure 17: A future image of interconnectedness of urban experiments between local experimental practices in Sweden; own edit
Through the cases studies that came under study in this project, one can observe that they succeed in the generation of local networks but this merely regards one project or a series of local projects that are connected to a “mother” project and take place within a specific local context, such as in
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the case of the “Malmö Innovation Platform”. In this case a network of practices exchange is generated however it remains extremely topical within the local context of Malmö municipality but does not seem to extend beyond and inspire new projects with similar structures and scope in other locales. This is connected to the non-existence of networks of practices between the local levels of urban governance. The case of the “Experiment Stockholm” project demonstrates this need for stronger networks. The report published by Nordregio et.al (p. 47, 2016) stresses the importance of “establishing” and “carefully maintaining” networks of actors and practice exchange, as this was not succeeded in the case of that project. Drawing from this, one addition that could be made to the framework of von Wirth et al (2019) could relate to the process of the “scaling” of an experiment. This additional strategy that could be used to attribute to the scaling of Urban Living Labs besides the “stimulation of entrepreneurial growth” and the “narratives of impact” could be the network of practice exchange beyond a single experiment or project.
7.1.2. Implications for urban governance
Urban governance itself is connected on great degree with the concept of urban Living Labs under the scope of sustainability transitions and the transformation of existing structures and governance practices especially in the local level that bares significant power in the Swedish planning context. Urban Living Labs have the capacity to significantly transform certain mechanisms behind urban development processes and the foundation for this is the transformation of the existing role of main actors in these processes. Urban Living Labs can aid municipalities in the creation of new channels of communication between main actors of urban development. What is more, urban experimentation has the capacity to upgrade the role of municipalities as the main actors of urban development and re-establish their role as the main facilitators of spatial transformation in an era of the private sector dominance over functions that previously were the responsibility of the public sector. Embracing a more visionary scope, the facilitation of co-creation and collaborative processes as well as a leading role in the creation of intra-local networks, on behalf of local administrations has the capacity to restore a leading role of the municipalities as the main actors that drive sustainable equitable and just urban development. However this does not imply an actual monopoly of local administrations, beyond the metaphorical use of the word in the Swedish planning context, but a leading role in collaborative schemes of urban governance that promote urban experimentation. An extension of this role of local administrations could be the support for experimental citizens’ initiatives, in the form of funding, or other related resources, necessary.
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7.1.3. Discussing the role of citizens
Citizens are integral components of Urban Living Labs. This is demonstrated by analyzing the origins of the concept, the exemplary practices identified as well as on a certain degree as demonstrated by the analysis of the pilots’ responses. Non-professional residents can and want to be parts of co- creation processes and have their voice heard when it comes to decision-making processes on sustainability issues around the development of their communities. Citizens can act not only as users in an Urban Living Lab environment, but as partners in co-creation schemes. They can take part both in the decision-making process around the shaping and structuring of an Urban Living Lab and as users involved in different activities that are initiated in the framework generated through the co-facilitation process. Through their responses, residents “legitimize” and support an increased leading role of local administrations in the facilitation of urban experimentation. Even beyond this, people can generate new experimental initiatives such as local urban gardening projects or the creation and maintenance of a neighborhood pocket park. However in that case what is pre-required is the support by the local administration as mentioned in 7.1.2. Under this light, Urban Living Labs can promote citizen participation and push it towards the upper stairs of Arnstein’s “Ladder of Citizen Participation”. However, what remains extremely problematic is the answer to the question “which citizen can be part of co-creation processes”. Is it citizens who are already active members of their communities through being parts of associations or members of local residents councils or municipality councils with political parties affiliations? How can one reach out to groups of residents beyond these categories or even the “idiots”8, people who show no interest in common community issues? The creation of new channels of communication between local administration and residents still remains an unanswered challenge. In a way, Urban Living Labs can help in the formation of new channels through which municipalities can reach out to residents and this is demonstrated by examples such as the “New light in Alby” and “Shape your world” labs. At the same time, Urban Living Labs require the preexistence of such channels in order to fulfill their “Living” component and establish themselves in real-life conditions by actively involving local populations.
8 The word “idiot” is used in the present context derives from the ancient Greek word “idiotes” (Ιδιώτης), which refers to ignorant citizens who do not contribute to public life. Idiot was mostly used in the context of the Athenian democracy where it was a moral and legal obligation of male Athenian citizens to actively take part in the common issues of the city. The etymology of the word itself implies an individual who prioritizes private interests over the common well-being.
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7.1.4. The role of planning professionals
Urban planners have a significant role to play in the facilitation and the internal processes that promote an Urban Living Lab framework to be established and flourish in and between the local governance context(s). Planners have the ability to identify challenges within the urban fabric and suggest sustainable means of addressing them. They are the professionals who can promote the role of local administration as facilitators of urban experimentation and become important actors in the generation of networks of urban experiments in an inter-local and international (or European) level. Planners can also offer to the Urban Living Lab concept through the private sector, public-private partnerships and organizations, as they have already been doing on a significant degree through bodies such as JPI Urban Europe and the European Network of Living Labs. But as discussed, planners probably have a lot to offer to sustainability transitions and urban experimentation as storytellers of urban practices. Storytelling is as old as history itself. In the middle ages, professional storytellers roamed the European continent carrying stories and tales they gathered from different locations as well as news from different regions of kingdoms and. These storytellers also referred to as “troubadours” or “minstrels”, would also exchange stories between them. Wherever they went there was a story to tell and noble courts as well as common people valued their presence and the stories they narrated or dramatized in the form of plays or music pieces as in many cases storytellers could perform by playing a musical instrument.
Figure 18: The medieval storyteller and the modern-day urban planner, sources: medievalstoryteleling.co.uk ; graphicmaps.com
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7.2. Directives for future research on urban experimentation and Urban Living Labs
The concept of Urban Living Labs is both relatively new and not new at the same time. The notion of a living lab as an experimental set-up in real life settings dates back to the era of Darwin and his observations in the Galapagos Islands, however the concept of Urban Living Labs has been given prominent attention during the past decade of even larger urbanization trends and the sustainability challenges that derive with it. A relatively newly emerging field of research such as urban experimentation in the form of Urban Living Lab implies various under-researched pathways of evolution. Implications for future research on the topic of Urban Living Labs can be divided into two distinct sections. The first relates to the themes of and around urban experimentation while the second research direction regards the methodologies for evolving and transforming the concept itself towards more normative pathways. After a decade of extensive research on the topic of Urban Living Labs and urban experimentation and practical implementation of related projects many areas still remain dark or blurry.
7.2.1. Emerging themes in the Urban Living Lab research
To begin with, Urban Living Labs have the capacity to address sustainability from a multi- perspective angle. However, what one can observe through a case study analysis not only on Sweden- based Urban Living Labs but on a European level, most cases of projects revolve around the themes of environmental and economic sustainability and in the merging area between these two themes. Urban Living Labs can be seen as territorial-based experiments that foster conditions for socio-technical innovation (Burch et.al, 2016). However the social aspects of sustainability are not as frequently addressed through urban experimentation and a prominent attention is given towards aspects of technical innovation as market-oriented responses to sustainable development. This techno-economical focus of Urban Living Labs projects, enhanced by the belief that they are the key to commercial success (Evans & Karvonen, 2010), has been questioned in relation to its transformative capacity on larger scales (Marvin et.al, 2018). As it was extensively discussed in the previous chapters, urban experimentation is highly connected to governance. At the same time Urban Living Lbs can offer a lot to the exploration of new urban governance pathways. Digital governance in the context of the concept of smart cities has been given prominent emphasis during the past decade and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic deems digitalization even more
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urgent than ever. Experimenting with ICT and digital governance as well as digital integrated forms of governance could unravel further potentials for a more inclusive approach to organizing and operating complex systems such as our cities. Another area where urban experimentation might produce significant findings is that of inclusion and exclusion in the urban context. The identification of marginalized groups in cities and the response to their needs requires a collaborative and innovative approach, especially when it comes to the issue of urban segregation and its implication for vulnerable populations, as well as inclusive participation in urban development processes. Experimenting with urban social inclusion can produce significant outcomes but at the same time such an approach requires extreme caution as the real-life settings in which experimentation is conducted might have unwanted impact in the lives of vulnerable populations by deteriorating conditions and creating more problems than intended to solve. The Urban Living Labs in Alby and more specifically the “Shape your world project” which was discussed in 4.2.2, highlights a potential pathway that can be further research. This concerns the integration of the youth perspective as a strong element of and for urban experimentation. The child or youth perspective is a theme of research that is becoming more and more popular and addressed more frequently in the field of urban studies especially in areas such as place-making. What is more, the involvement of children from an early age in activities related to sustainability future challenges can be an educational activity with the aim of raising long-term awareness. Experimenting in the urban context through the eyes of children can point towards unseen pathways and demonstrate alternative visions for places. Future urban experiments could attempt to integrate more the children perspective and create a bridging framework with the field of Children Geographies. What is more, as for now there is no clear and universal answer to the question of how to scale up experiments. Future research could examine the mechanisms that create the precondition for the successful scaling up of Urban Living Labs and how this process of scaling up can affect the transformative capacity of Urban Living Labs both on an international and within specific contexts and planning systems. Regarding the process of scaling up, more attention could be given to the role of the planners and their status as storytellers. A future theme of research could relate to the identity of urban planners as storytellers and how this role can promote the spreading of urban experimentation and inclusive co- creation, or the role of storytelling in urban governance sustainability transitions. Urban Living Labs and their international networks can urge professionals as well as non-professional people to “think globally and act locally”, becoming significant agents of change. The impact of extensive inter-local networks of Urban Living Labs in urban governance is also an area that is still largely unexamined and more knowledge need to be generated in order to define and understand the mechanisms through which urban experiments can be institutionalized for long term implementation as tool of and for urban governance (von Wirth et.al, 2019). The difficulty to scale up
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experiments from the local context (Karvonen, Smas, personal communication, 2020) as also identified in chapter 4, could be underpinned through further studying the effects between experiments that take place on networks within similar contexts and local realities instead a mere focus on projects that are connected through international networks. Finally a reference should be made to another major challenge which concerns the development of local Urban Living Lab initiatives and this is the funding issue that emerges. Setting up an urban experiment requires significant amount of financial resources. In most civic-oriented typologies of Urban Living Labs funding is secured through a combination of municipal funds, funds from knowledge institutes, European or national funds as well as from organizations and private companies and the industry which usually in turn set the scope and goals of the experiment (Marvin et.al, 2018). This can be considered a main reason why in many cases Urban living Lab projects fail to depart from a marketization course and address vital issues of social significance. Grassroot typologies of Urban Living Labs usually are more sensitive and oriented towards such matters, as discussed in chapter 3; however what they lack in most cases is a steady funding source. A combination of grassroots and civic typologies of urban experiments could benefit from further research into funding means for long-term viability of projects and networks of experiments. The advance of the role of social economy initiatives can potentially enhance the role of people as drivers of innovation. What is more as of today most of the funding is directed to big scale projects (Curtis, 2015). More research could be directed to the funding opportunities of the creation of networks of urban experiments between different locales and towards the sharing of knowledge and know-how.
7.2.2. Suggestions for methodological pathways in Urban Living Lab-urban experimentation research
The original idea behind this project as mentioned in 2.3 was that the collection of data would take place in the form of a qualitative study in collaboration with a specific municipality related actors to the topic of urban development as well as residents. Since the topic of the study concerns urban experimentation and its implications for sustainability transitions, to the core of the methodology could be the structuring of an experiment itself by involving local actors in what could resemble an Urban Living Lab structure. The aim of such a methodology would be to observe how different actors interact within a framework set up by the researcher that simulates real-life conditions. Experimental ethnography can be a trans-disciplined process where sustainability studies meet social sciences and social anthropology. In this case, people are not mere informants during an ethnographic study but they transform into collaborators in the shaping of the experiment and this can be considered an experimental approach to ethnography itself (Estalella, 2014).
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Westerlund and Leminen (2011) define “evaluation” as an integral characteristic of Urban Living Labs along with co-creation, exploration and experimentation. At the same time it becomes the final process that is found after the design and operation of an urban experiment or a set of experiments, as in the case of joint initiative projects such as the “SubUrbanLab Project”. Evaluation is the final stage of Urban Living Labs as single projects, an attempt to assess their outcomes and impacts taking into account socio-economic, socio-cognitive and socio-ergonomic criteria. The process Evaluation is also referred to as a significant and inseparable characteristic of ULLs by multiple scholars who have been engaged with the topic (Chronéer et.al, 2019 ; von Wirth, 2019 ; Mccormick & Hartmann, 2017). Evaluation becomes an important process since the feedback it provides can lead to the readjustment, refinement or continuation of project goals and scopes within a context or field of ULL engagement (Mccormick & Hartmann, 2017) The evaluation of the Urban Living Labs’ outcomes has always been a challenging a challenging and gray area for practitioners and researchers (Andrew Karvonen ; Lucas Smas, personal communication, 2020). So far, what has been developed is the employment of qualitative sets of criteria to assess and evaluate the outcome of the implementation of Urban Living Lab projects. Such criteria are for instance the contribution of Urban Living Labs to different aspects of sustainability or the fulfillment of the definition of Urban Living Labs (Karlsson et.al, 2016). As a result, the evaluative framework for urban experiments takes up a more descriptive form. Especially when it comes to the social impacts of urban Living Labs, a general observation to be made is the absence of clarity around a system of indicators for evaluation. The exploration of new methods can lead to a more concrete framework for the evaluation of Urban Living Lab outcomes that will help enhance their transformative capacity through the scaling up of successful practices and concepts generated. The exploration of appropriate indicators and an attempt to quantify some evaluative criteria might prove of significant importance towards this direction. In relation to the framing of Urban Experimentation, there might need to develop more concrete theoretical foundation that highlight the normative stance of the concept of urban Living Labs and Urban Experimentation in general. Recognizing the issue of complexity and wickedness of the problems that urban experimentation attempts to provide solutions with, there might be a need for the development of an overarching broader theory that frames Urban Experimentation. What could be researched more at this point is a renewed approach to a unifying theory for connecting transitions theories, theories of governance, laboratory studies as well as systems theory, for the interdependent approach to the study of urban experimentation. Complexity theory can be applied in relation to planning and governance theories for the understanding and analysis of cities as complex systems that generate “wicked” conditions as well as grounding research into developing new types of Urban Labs that respond to these wicked conditions (Zivkovic, 2018).
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7.3. The future of Urban Living Labs-some concluding remarks
Urban Living Labs have undoubtedly been “born and raised” in the first two decades of the 21st century, although the background of this concept has been around for much longer. Thus, they became very popular as a concept and as a mode of urban governance especially in the European context where one can witness a wide implementation of ULL resembling projects after 2010 in various interconnected locales, forming networks of Urban Living Labs between European countries. The concept of Urban Living Labs was shaped after more than a decade of discussions and research on the notion of communicative and collaborative planning but still inclusive planning practices were ongoing since previous decades. This is a major reason why Urban Living Labs are seen as an inclusive tool for urban governance as they seem to encompass important principles set by the theorizations on the collaborative understanding of urban planning. But all concepts evolve and Urban Living Labs have evolved rapidly in within the past decade to become a popular tool among policymakers especially in Western Europe when trying to understand how practitioners from varying professional fields can engage in co-creation. One must not forget that Urban Living Labs can be seen as a “brand” concept, a popular and “catchy” name that on the other hand encompasses important planning principles, however requires a constant rebranding to sell-off better in a competitive and highly commercialized planning arena where funding is always scarce and limited to individual projects. As a result, one way the concept might evolve is through rebranding, by changing its name, while it retains essential principles and content as a normative-oriented tool for addressing sustainability challenges between different locales. “Missions” is a popular term among professionals who are engaged with the topic (Kes Mccormick & Jonas Bylund, personal communication, 2020) and prominent interest have been given to this term by JPI Urban Europe. It reflects the need for the generation of larger visions as in urban transformation for sustainable and livable urban areas. This also relates to the visionary scope of the Sustainable Development Goals. Missions can be about regaining capacity for public administration to work with transformative oriented concepts, beyond the conventional agenda or modes of practices. Missions are also about more research into public funding of transformative oriented projects or the “municipalization” of practices, which acknowledges local administration as active knowledge practitioners. “Missions” might then indicate that the future of the concept is now dependent on how the local administrations will respond to the emerging potentials accompanying urban experimentation. The future of Urban Living Labs is also dependent on the future of urban experimentation itself. Rapidly shifting conditions as well as unexpected turns on the way to the future, render experimenting with city futures a mode of urban governance that is here to stay. Uncertainty might establish urban experimentation as a permanent method to address the even growing challenges in urban areas around the globe. However this visionary image is positioned far from our current understanding of urban
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planning and development processes, so it is more likely that the main actors engaging with it might project an altered role in the future “city of experimentation”. Perhaps the role that is about to be significantly enhanced is the one of the “urban inhabitants”, as users and partners of co-creation through experimenting with alternative futures. At the same time the professionals’ role need to adapt to the emerging conditions. At this point, let’s take a step back and picture this future city of experimentation. At some point it might be the case that experimental governance will ultimately overtake conventional governance modes (Karvonen, personal communication, 2020). Then, it all comes down to who will be able to fund this new governance approach. If it is not the public sector then what we might witness is an even greater retreat of the public sector’s capacity to influence or even authorize urban development. In this dystopian image of the future, experiments are overshadowing public-led urban governance and instead support the same tools of capitalist development and neoliberal mechanisms that generated many problematic urban conditions in the first place. In that case it is very unlikely that urban experimentation bears the capacity to catalyze transformation in the context of urban sustainability. In the case of Sweden, Urban Living Labs need to be studies both as nodes in international project networks and at the same time as nodes of practice and knowledge exchange within the Swedish context. In Sweden the preconditions exist for local administrations to utilize the fruits of urban experimentation through engaging in networks of inter-local projects within and outside Sweden. However this is highly dependent on the will of local administrations to act beyond conventional planning practices and their capacity to release funding towards that direction. The individual projects that took place in Swedish municipalities indeed point towards and alternative way of performing urban governance, on a smaller or greater degree, still “transformation” requires a lot more than individual projects operating until the end of their life-cycle, which is a result of scarce funding conditions. Transformation is depended on interconnection and integration of the concept and principles behind Urban Living Labs and not necessarily their “brand name”, as well as the wider application of successful practices. In that sense, inclusive urban experimentation not only in the Swedish context but at a European one still lies on a primitive and initial stage if one considers its transformative scope. On the other hand, local projects like “Shape your world” in Alby, that lie far from the spotlight of the “shiny” paradigms, demonstrate an eco- local way forward by offering local experimental conditions and integrating unheard perspectives. Urban experimentation remains a promising concept for urban governance of sustainability transitions. Whether one frames it under the label of Urban Living Labs or by inventing a different “brand-name” to describe the same encompassed principles experimenting with alternative futures is becoming more popular and is tried in different fields related to sustainable development producing both positive and questionable outcomes, as every other mode of urban governance. Urban experimentation is
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not a panacea to solving all contemporary societal and environmental challenges; however researchers, practitioners, officials and the civil society should be open to potentials that it holds, especially for the transformation of urban governance practices as a precondition to the transition into a more sustainable urban reality. Wickedness in real and practitioners should treat it as such. Treating a wicked problem as a benign one (Law, 2014) might underestimate potential impacts and unforeseen aspects. This does not mean that there is no space for new perspectives on handling wickedness, beyond its traditional understanding. One such way which is already incorporated into the logic behind Urban Living Labs is the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary contributions framework (Lawrence, 2010; Brown et.al, 2010) Because, to conclude, Urban Living Labs can be seen permanently integrated tools of and for governance can contribute to the resilience of our cities by promoting a departure from the business as usual way of practicing urban development and a new framework for inclusive and innovative responses to wicked problems.
Figure 19: Images of the future- The experimental city ; own edit
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Appendix
Appendix 1: Interview with professionals
Interview with Lucas Smas Date: 2020.2.18 Location: Stockholm University, Department of Human Geography Sequence of questions:
1. Could you briefly define the concept of Urban Living Labs? 2. How extensively has the concept of ULLs been implemented in the Swedish context. Do you believe there is a strong or a weak relevance and why? 3. What makes an area more suited to experimentation? 4. Are Urban Living Labs more relevant to specific thematics related to sustainable development agenda? Which topics do you consider more relevant for addressing through this concept and which less? 5. What was your role in the implementation of “Experiment Stockholm”? 6. What were the main challenges in the implementation of the Experiment Stockholm project? Was the outcome of experiment Stockholm expected? 7. Who are the citizens that can be considered as partners? Is it those who are already active in certain citizen groups and organization or can we reach the voices that are not heard? How can one foster their participation? 8. Do you believe that the implementation of Urban Living Labs as more inclusive modes of urban governance have the capacity to challenge or re-invent existing power relations and structures in the local context? 9. Can ULLs and their implementation present with the capacity of restoring the role of municipalities and public-led urban governance in the face of a prevailing neoliberal and market- oriented trajectory?
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Interview with Andrew Karvonen Date: 2020.02.20 Location: KTH Stories café (KTH Library) Sequence of Questions:
1. Could you briefly define the concept of Urban Living Labs? 2. Do you consider Urban Living Labs being sites, processes or a combination of both and why? 3. Are Urban Living Labs more relevant to specific thematics related to sustainable development agenda? Which topics do you consider more relevant for addressing through this concept and which less? 4. What makes an area more suited to experimentation? 5. How extensively has the concept of ULLs been implemented in the Swedish context. Do you believe there is a strong or a weak relevance with the Swedish planning framework and why? 6. Do you envision Urban Living Labs as permanently integrated tools of governance in the local government context? What are the boundaries of the municipality’s role in experimentation? 7. Who are the citizens that can be considered as partners? Is it those who are already active in certain citizen groups and organization or can we reach the voices that are not heard? How can one foster their participation? 8. Do you believe that the implementation of Urban Living Labs as more inclusive modes of urban governance have the capacity to challenge or re-invent existing power relations and structures in the local context? 9. Can ULLs and their implementation present with the capacity of restoring the role of municipalities and public-led urban governance in the face of a prevailing neoliberal and market- oriented trajectory?
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Online Interview with Kes Mccormick Date: 2020.03.04 Platform: “Zoom” Sequence of questions that guided the discussion:
1. Could you briefly define the concept of Urban Living Labs? 2. Are Urban Living Labs more relevant to specific thematics related to sustainable development agenda? Which topics do you consider more relevant for addressing through this concept and which less? 3. What makes an area more suited for experimentation? 4. How extensively has the concept of ULLs been implemented in the Swedish context. Do you believe there is a strong or a weak relevance and why? 5. Do you envision Urban Living Labs as permanently integrated tools of governance in the local government context? What are the boundaries of the municipality’s role in experimentation? 6. Who are the citizens that can be considered as partners? Is it those who are already active in certain citizen groups and organization or can we reach the voices that are not heard? How can one foster their participation? 7. Do you believe that the implementation of Urban Living Labs as more inclusive modes of urban governance have the capacity to challenge or re-invent existing power relations and structures in the local context? 8. Which GUST sub-project gave you the most insight into the relationship between ULLs and the framework of sustainability transitions and how? 9. What is the future of Urban Living Labs as a term and as a concept?
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Online Interview with Jonas Bylund Date: 16th of March 2020 Platform: “Zoom”
1. Could you briefly define the concept of Urban Living Labs? 2. Do you believe there is a need for a more uniform ULL framework? The issue of different typologies, for instance what is the distinction between utilize-enabler-user classification and civic-grasroot- strategic one? 3. Are Urban Living Labs more relevant to specific thematics related to sustainable development agenda? Which topics do you consider more relevant for addressing through this concept and which less? 4. What makes an area more suited for experimentation? 5. What is the role of the planner in the context of Urban Living Labs- (referring to the existing role and the potentials) 6. How extensively has the concept of ULLs been implemented in the Swedish context. Do you believe there is a strong or a weak relevance and why? What has the experience of the JPI Urban Europe shown? 7. What is the role of the municipality in an Urban Living Lab environment of experimentation? 8. Who are the citizens that can be considered as partners? Is it those who are already active in certain citizen groups and organization or can we reach the voices that are not heard? How can one foster their participation? 9. To what extend has the replication and scaling up of existing experiments been succeeded both within and outside the Swedish context? What mechanisms do you consider are important for these processes? 10. How can you sum up the outcome of ULL implementation in the past decade? What is the future of Urban Living Labs? –reference to the concept of “Missions”
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Unstructured Interview with Anja Karlsson Date: 2020.04.14 Platform: “Zoom”
Main points of the discussion:
1. Anja’s role in the SubUrbanLab Project 2. The local conditions in Alby 3. Population characteristics in Alby 4. The main actors in the ULLs 5. The challenges of the ULL process 6. The main communication channels during the process 7. The conflicting ideas on Urban Living Labs 8. The main “take-aways” from the project experience for Anja as a professional
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Appendix 2: Online Surveys
Survey on Urban Governance and Participation in Norrtälje Municipality Enkätstudie: Deltagande och stadsutveckling i Norrtälje kommun
Hej! Jag heter Spilios Iliopoulos, kommer från Grekland och studerar samhällsplanering på KTH. Nu gör jag mitt examensarbete och skriver om medborgardeltagande och om olika experimentella metoder för att skapa mer deltagande i beslut om stadsutveckling. I höstas gjorde vi ett projekt i Norrtälje och jag har därför valt kommunen för min studie som en fortsättning på vårt projekt om Rimbo. Denna enkät är en del av min studie och jag skulle verkligen uppskatta om du har möjlighet att svara på några frågor om hur du som boende i Norrtälje ser på möjligheten till alternativa former för deltagande och beslutsprocesser och vilka erfarenheter du själv har. Enkäten tar ungefär 10 minuter att besvara.Du kan lämna kommentarer i slutet av enkäten. Tack på förhand! Spilios
Frågor:
1. a) Har du någon gång deltagit i en dialogprocess eller någon annan form av deltagande vid framtagandet av en plan (exempelvis detaljplan eller översiktsplan) eller ett stadsutvecklingsprojekt i kommunen?
JA NEJ VET EJ Om du svarat ja: b) vad handlade planen/projektet alt planerna/projekten om: c) på vilket sätt blev du inbjuden? (t.ex. e-post, annons i tidning eller internet, brev, personlig kontakt)
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
2. Tror du att invånare som inte har expertkunskap om stadsutveckling eller liknande kan bidra till att frågor om lokal hållbarhet och bidra till utvecklingen, till exempel i sitt kvarter, i staden, kommunen eller regionen?
JA NEJ KANSKE VET EJ
3. Vilka anser du är mest effektiva för att skapa hållbara lösningar för olika utmaningar som kan finnas i en stad?
Offentlig sektor (t.ex. kommunen)
Privat sektor (t. ex byggföretag)
Annat. Ange vem/vilka:……………………………………………….
4. Är du av uppfattningen att privat sektor självständigt kan bevaka och säkra att allmänna intressen tas tillvara?
JA NEJ KANSKE VET EJ
5. Är du av uppfattningen att samarbeten mellan invånare, kommuner, föreningar, forskare (universitet) och företag kan skapa bättreförutsättningar för hållbara lösningar än när de arbetar var för sig?
JA NEJ KANSKE VET EJ
6. Tror du att breda samarbeten I beslutsfattande om stadsutveckling kan öka förutsättningarna för jämlikhet och rättvisa?
JA NEJ KANSKE VET EJ
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
7. Tror du att experiment med alternativa former för beslutsfattande och deltagande kan vara ett sätt att uppnå bättre och mer hållbara resultat i hur kommunen och bebyggelsen utvecklas?
8. Tycker du att sådana experiment borde prioritera invånarnas roll och deltagande i beslutsprocessen eller ett bredare samarbete mellan exempelvis invånare, tjänstemän, politiker, företag och föreningar och andra delar av civilsamhället?
Invånarnas roll Bredare samarbeten Båda är lika viktiga Vet ej
9. Är du eller har varit engagerad i någon förening eller annan organisation i civilsamhället? (exempel hembygdsförening, idrottsförening, församling, Röda korset mfl)
Ja – aktiv Ja – då och då Ja - sällan Nej
10. Om du skulle bli inbjuden att delta tillsammans med kommunen och andra, till exempel föreningar, universitet, företag, att delta i workshops kring alternativa former för beslutsfattande kring en plan eller stadsutvecklingsprojekt (experiment som ovan), hur troligt är det att du skulle delta?
Mycket troligt Troligt
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Kanske Inte alls troligt Vet ej
11. Hur ser du på att själv delta praktiskt i utvecklingen av den fysiska miljön i din stadsdel, till exempel genom att skapa en park eller planteringar, bygga delar i en lekpark, delta i konstprojekt etc.
Mycket positiv Positiv Negativ Mycket negativ Vet inte
12. Övriga kommentarer och synpunkter du vill dela med dig av:
……………………………………………………………………………………………………
AgeÅlder 12-17 år 18-24 år 25-34 år 35-44 år 45-54 år 55-64 år 65-75 år 75 år-
Gender Kön Male Man FemaleKvinna Other Icke-binär/annat
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Spilios Iliopoulos Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation: The case of Urban Living Labs. Insights from the Swedish Context
Occupation Sysselsättning Studierhögstadieeller gymnasium Studier högskola/universitet Anställd Egen företagare Arbetslös Pensionär Annat
Högsta avslutad utbildning Högstadie Gymnasium Universitet Yrkesutbildning Doktorsexamen Annat......
Comments on the survey:
Concerning the pilot that was intended for residents of Norrtälje Kommun, out of 47 responses, 46 were considered valid for integrating into the study and being able to draw conclusions from. The age representation is almost equally divided between the different age groups, however there is an overrepresentation of female respondents (74,5%). In the survey intended for residents in Swedish municipalities beyond Norrtälje, there is an overrepresentation of the age group 25-34, followed by the age-group 18-24. There is once more an overrepresentation of female respondents (73,3%). In the second pilot 30 out of 31 answers can be considered valid. The majority of the responses came from residents of municipalities within Stockholm County.
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DEGREE PROJECT IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT, SECOND CYCLE, 30 CREDITS STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN 2020
Investigating the Transformative Capacity of Urban Experimentation
The case of Urban Living Labs: Insights from the Swedish Context
SPILIOS ILIOPOULOS
KTH ROYAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT TRITA -ABE-MBT-20606
www.kth.se