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Abstract: In today's ongoing urbanisation and the climate changes there is an increasing demand on cities to be innovative and inclusive to solve these issues. As an answer to these challenges, the concept of Urban Living Labs has started to emerge. These Urban Living Labs aims to involve citizens in the process of developing the city. To date, there is a confusion concerning these Urban Living Labs are, what their objective is, their characteristics and their organisation. Hence, in this paper we build on the ongoing project UNaLab and the city representatives perspective of what an Urban Living Lab is and how it can contribute to their city´s challenges, to define Urban Living Labs and its three dimensions.
Keywords: Urban Living Lab; Citizens; Nature-based solutions; UNaLab; Innovation; Stakeholders; Urban development; Characteristics, Experimentation; Sustainability
1 Introduction
The ongoing urbanisation is forcing cities all around the globe to become more smart and innovative to answer to challenges such as, e.g. pollution, waste management, citizens quality of life. Hence, cities needs to become smarter and healthier than they are today. Some of the most interesting citizen-close innovation happens in cities, in relation to for instance collaborative economy as in car-sharing and bike-sharing (Cohen et al., 2016). But opening up the innovation process requires involving different stakeholders in the innovation activities (Chesbrough, 2006) stimulating and generating exchange of knowledge between different actors (Lehmann et al., 2015). Living labs is one approach of managing open innovation processes, where different stakeholders (including citizens) are involved in co-creation, exploration, experimentation, and evaluation in open realworld settings (e.g., Bergvall-Kåreborn, Holst, and Ståhlbrost, 2009; ENoLL, 2015). Also, living labs are based on specific methodologies and tools, and implemented through specific innovation projects and community-building activities (Schaffers & Turkama, 2012). But despite the fact that a certain body of literature attempts to clarify the concept (Almirall et al., 2012; Leminen, 2015), living lab practices are still under-researched (Schuurman, 2015). In specific, as cities today increasingly are being looked as places to drive innovation and to contribute to urban development (Evans & Karvonen, 2011).
The ideal living lab platform to integrate interests of citizens and other stakeholders with innovative experiences can be urban areas such as city centers, neighborhoods, universities and companies. Within this approach,...