Urb@Exp project, led by Maastricht University, launches LAB kit for urban labs
Short announcement
On the 8th of June 2017, the LAB kit designed by the the URB@Exp project was launched in Graz, Austria. The toolkit is aimed at municipalities or other stakeholders in a city who are toying with the idea to set up an urban lab. Through guidelines and materials, the kit supports, inspires and helps to structure multi-stakeholder discussions in a three-phased workshop setting to lay the groundwork for a living lab for sustainable development in an urban environment.
Elaborate report
From 7-8 June 2017, the URB@Exp project consortium held a final conference in the city of Graz (Austria) to present and discuss the results of this 3-years transdisciplinary research project co-funded by JPI Urban Europe. At the conference, two of the key deliverables were showcased, tested and discussed: a small book with Guidelines for Urban Labs and a LAB kit for (future) urban lab practitioners.
The URB@Exp consortium strategically merged a transdisciplinary set of partners including four universities, five cities and one SME. These partners contributed a wealth of scientific, professional and experiential knowledge to the collaboration. Under the lead of Prof. René Kemp at ICIS (Maastricht University’s scientific institute for sustainable development), the consortium consisted of eight further partners: the universities of Graz, Malmö and Lund, the cities of Antwerp, Graz, Leoben, Maastricht and Malmö, and the foresight and design company Pantopicon. University and city partners were jointly involved in the design and implementation of the urban lab experiments in the five cities under study, in joint reflexive learning during the experiments, and in evaluating and drawing lessons from the experiments.
The guidelines (http://www.urbanexp.eu/guidelines) are intended for team members and managers of urban labs and, more generally, for civil servants and facilitators in cities working with experimental urban governance processes to tackle complex challenges. They aim to support the everyday practice of collaboratively experimenting and learning how to create more sustainable and inclusive cities. These guidelines do not provide a single definitive answer on ways to organize and run an urban lab or its experimental activities, but rather they offer, through frameworks and examples, guidance for ways to act in relation to, and reflect on, key issues.
The LAB kit (http://www.urbanexp.eu/labkit) (including a printed version of the book with guidelines) is aimed at municipalities or other stakeholders in a city who are toying with the idea to set up an urban lab. Through guidelines and materials, the kit supports, inspires and helps to structure multi-stakeholder discussions in a three-phased workshop setting to lay the groundwork for an urban lab for sustainable development in cities.