Cities seek innovative holistic approaches to becoming more resilient and tackling climate hazards and impacts. Urban Living Labs are open ecosystems where different stakeholders co-create innovative solutions tailored to their unique context. At the same time, to achieve a broader impact, a certain level of generalization for learning and systematic replication across geographical, institutional, and sectoral borders is needed.
Within the SCORE - Smart Control of the Climate Resilience in European Coastal Cities project, the SCORE team investigated 10 Urban Living Labs to find out what barriers (to be avoided) and drivers (to be encouraged) emerge from a living lab approach. In SCORE, the (Coastal City) Living Labs aim to co-create innovative climate resilience solutions through a cross-cutting and data-driven approach while engaging and empowering diverse stakeholders. The researchers are curious to explore the extent of these barriers and drivers being similar or different across different Urban Living Lab contexts in six countries, demonstrating the duality between contextualization and generalization.
The research identified several barriers and drivers for mainstreaming and upscaling solutions to increase climate resilience through the Living Lab Integrative Process across three categories.
- First, social and cultural aspects highlighted include stakeholder engagement and awareness, communication, and dissemination.
- Second, the team assessed institutional and political aspects, such as silos, bureaucracy, and resources.
- Last, they investigated technical factors such as knowledge and experience, technical and internal capacity, data availability and accessibility, climate-related policies and actions, and long-term perspective.
The results suggest that while some barriers and drivers are common across the cases, providing generalizable patterns, there are also specific differences requiring tailored solutions at the local scale. Nonetheless, the diversity in drivers indicates the potential for sharing knowledge across cases to translate, embed, and scale solutions, enhancing the transition toward climate resilience. Learning and innovation in real-life contexts are fundamental in the Living Lab approach, and the findings demonstrate that cross-case learning can enhance an iterative process of contextualizing and generalizing innovative climate solutions.
If we look at Urban Living Labs in different contexts, we see that we are unique but also quite similar! We can exchange knowledge and learn from each other, looking for synergies and joining networks.
- More information
Check out the recently published research articles for more details: https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.2097.
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