Urban Living Labs

All cities face a pressing challenge – how can they provide economic prosperity and social cohesion while achieving environmental sustainability? In response, new collaborations are emerging in the form of urban living labs – sites devised to design, test and learn from social and technical innovation in real time. The aim of this volume is to examine, inform and advance the governance of sustainability transitions through urban living labs. Notably, urban living labs are proliferating rapidly across the globe as a means through which public and private actors are testing innovations in buildings, transport and energy systems. Yet despite the experimentation taking place on the ground, we lack systematic learning and international comparison across urban and national contexts about their impacts and effectiveness. We have limited knowledge on how good practice can be scaled up to achieve the transformative change required. This book brings together leading international researchers within a systematic comparative framework for evaluating the design, practices and processes of urban living labs to enable the comparative analysis of their potential and limits. It provides new insights into the governance of urban sustainability and how to improve the design and implementation of urban living labs in order to realise their potential.

This book presents the results of a multi-annual project with sustainable Living Labs in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. Living Labs – as initiated by the authors – have proved to be very promising research, design, co-creation and communication facilities for the development and implementation of sustainable innovations in the home. The book provides an inspiring introduction to both the methodology and business modelling for the Living Lab facilities. Understanding daily living at home is key to designing products and services that support households in their transition to more sustainable lifestyles. This book not only explores new ways of gaining insights into daily practices, but also discusses developing and testing design methods to create sustainable solutions for households. These new methods and tools are needed because those available are either ineffective or cause rebound-effects. Intended for researchers and designers with an interest in the transition to sustainable lifestyles, it also appeals to company leaders interested in new ways of developing sustainable innovations and offers suggestions for effectively applying Living Labs for sustainable urban development.

The world’s population is currently undergoing a significant transition towards urbanisation, with the UN expecting that 70% of people globally will live in cities by 2050. Urbanisation has multiple political, cultural, environmental and economic dimensions that profoundly influence social development and innovation. This fundamental long-term transformation will involve the realignment of urban society’s technologies and infrastructures, culture and lifestyles, as well as governance and institutional frameworks. Such structural systemic realignments can be referred to as urban sustainability transitions: fundamental and structural changes in urban systems through which persistent societal challenges are addressed, such as shifts towards urban farming, renewable decentralised energy systems, and social economies. This book provides new insights into how sustainability transitions unfold in different types of cities across the world and explores possible strategies for governing urban transitions, emphasising the co-evolution of material and institutional transformations in socio-technical and socio-ecological systems. With case studies of mega-cities such as Seoul, Tokyo, New York and Adelaide, medium-sized cities such as Copenhagen, Cape Town and Portland, and nonmetropolitan cities such as Freiburg, Ghent and Brighton, the book provides an opportunity to reflect upon the comparability and transferability of theoretical/conceptual constructs and governance approaches across geographical contexts. Urban Sustainability Transitions is key reading for students and scholars working in Environmental Sciences, Geography, Urban Studies, Urban Policy and Planning.

This two-volume set LNCS 10911 and 10912 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Cross-Cultural Design, CCD 2018, held as part of HCI International 2018 in Las Vegas, NV, USA, in July 2018.The total of 1170 papers and 195 posters included in the 30 HCII 2018 proceedings volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from 4373 submissions. The 37 regular papers presented in this volume were organized in topical sections named: culture, learning and games; culture and creativity; cross-cultural design for social change and development.

Digital Participation through Social Living Labs connects two largely separate debates: On the one hand, high speed internet access and associated technologies are often heralded as a means to bring about not only connectivity, but also innovation, economic development, new jobs, and regional prosperity. On the other hand, community development research has established that access by itself is necessary but not sufficient to foster digital participation for the broadest possible range of individuals. Edited by leading scholars from the fields of education, youth studies, urban informatics, librarianship, communication technology, and digital media studies, this book is positioned as a link to connect these debates. It brings together an international collection of empirically grounded case studies by researchers and practitioners from diverse backgrounds. They advance knowledge that fosters digital participation by identifying the specific digital needs, issues and practices of different types of communities as they seek to take advantage of access to digital technologies. Collectively, these cases propose new ways for enabling residents to develop their digital confidence and skills both at home and in their local community, particularly through a 'social living labs' approach. The book is organised around key focus areas: digital skills enhancement, youth entrepreneurship, connected learning, community digital storytelling, community-led digital initiatives and policy development.

In this volume scholars from around the world discuss the innovative forms of collaboration between public and private actors that contribute to making our cities more liveable. It offers helpful insights into the practices of partnerships and the ways in which partnerships can contribute to a more liveable urban environment. The liveability of our cities is a topic of increasing relevance and urgency. The world’s cities are becoming congested and polluted, putting pressure on affordable housing and causing safety to become a major problem. Urban governments are unable to address these major challenges on their own, and thus they seek cooperation with other governments, companies, civil society organizations, and citizens. By focusing on examples such as greenery in the city, affordable housing, safety, neighbourhood revitalization, and ‘learning by doing’ in urban living labs, this book asks two key questions. How do partnerships between public and private actors contribute to the liveability of cities? Under what conditions are partnerships successful, and when do they fail to yield the desired results?

As the global population continues to increase, it has become necessary to find ways to handle this increase through various policy tools that address population growth and urbanization problems. The urbanization process has both potential issues and opportunities that need to be exploited to move societies forward. Megacities and Rapid Urbanization: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice examines trends, challenges, issues, and strategies related to population growth and rapid urbanization and its impact on urban environments. The book also explores the use of different governance approaches in addressing challenges and different tools and systems of appropriate allocation to address issues. This publication is an ideal reference source for academicians, students, practitioners, professionals, managers, urban planners, and government officials.

This open access book explores creative and collaborative forms of research praxis within the social sustainability sciences. The term co-creativity is used in reference to both individual methods and overarching research approaches. Supported by a series of in-depth examples, the edited collection critically reviews the potential of co-creative research praxis to nurture just and transformative processes of change. Included amongst the individual chapters are first-hand accounts of such as: militant research strategies and guerrilla narrative, decolonial participative approaches, appreciative inquiry and care-ethics, deep-mapping, photo-voice, community-arts, digital participatory mapping, creative workshops and living labs. The collection considers how, through socially inclusive forms of action and reflection, such co-creative methods can be used to stimulate alternative understandings of why and how things are, and how they could be. It provides illustrations of (and problematizes) the use of co-creative methods as overtly disruptive interventions in their own right, and as a means of enriching the transformative potential of transdisciplinary and more traditional forms of social science research inquiry. The positionality of the researcher, together with the emotional and embodied dimensions of engaged scholarship, are threads which run throughout the book. So too does the question of how to communicate sustainability science research in a meaningful way.