A presentation delivered in Brussels on 13th february 2017 International Evidence Review 'Experimenting with Urban Living Labs (ULLs) beyond Smart City-Regions'

1. International Evidence Review
'Experimenting with Urban Living Labs
(ULLs) beyond Smart City-Regions'
Nicola M Headlam & Michael Keith
13th. February 2017.

3. Knowledge Mobilisation for
Urban Transformation
• Intelligent city-region : roles and rules
– Cognitive city region as knowledge economy (networked) mode
of production
– Role of civic university in place-based statecraft at sub-national
scale
– Co-production of research, innovation and policy-making (OI2)
• Urban and Living Labs work 2016
– Emergent Institutional infrastructures: UK
– International exemplars and ideas for UK

4. • What does inter-disciplinary integrating place making mean? How can we bring
together expertise in areas such as computing, mapping, politics, economy, digital
anthropology, spatial analysis and urban planning?
• How can we deal with multi-stakeholder ‘helix strategies’? What arethe roles of
the private sector, public authorities, academia, civil society and
entrepreneurs/activists in these ULLs initiatives? What should the roles be?
• How can ULLs, as a form of collective urban governance, positively influence the
smart policy agenda in Europe by going beyond its governance implications?
• What makes the ULL approach attractive and novel?
• How are ULL initiatives being operationalised in contemporary urban governance
for sustainability and low carbon cities?
• What prospects are there for alternative funding and business models for cities
and regions in Europe?
• What are the practical and political interventions needed within multi-stakeholder
approaches, and what are the potential concerns about data technopolitics?
• Is another urban governance model possible, a third way between state and
market?

5. Platforms (international)

6. drivers i
• The growing trend of increased city autonomy evidenced in devolution
deals, ‘northern’ (and other) powerhouses and local economic
partnerships.
• Unique but networked nature of urban economies that demand a
growth in capacity of research based city intelligence for economic
development.
• Pressures on public expenditure that generate pressures for major
public service reform, recognizing the market innovation possible in
annual budgets of several hundred billion pounds annually across the
UK.
• Systemic pressures on old models of city governance that demand
citizen engagement and more sophisticated interaction with the public
domain.

7. drivers ii
• The need for cities to develop urban futures scenario
planning in the face of rapid social and economic change.
• The opportunity for cities to use new methods of data
gathering to shape intelligent systems and new
technologies both to engage citizens and restructure
basic infrastructure provision.
• The challenge for cities to address challenges of
vulnerabilities in the built environment, governance
networks, metabolic flows (production, consumption and
supply chains) and social dynamics at the heart of the
city resilience agendas.

8. Adaptive = intelligent?
The cities that will best survive the challenges facing us in
the coming urban century are those that are most
amenable to uncertainty. They are those that build
flexibility into their code. They assume they will need to
accommodate change, and empower their citizens to help
them do so. They have solid goals, without a fixed agenda,
and they have vision without expectation. They plan
through inquiry rather than didacticism, and draw with
pencils rather than pens. They know they don’t know
what’s coming, so they plan to adapt to anything.
Christin McLaren BMW Guggenheim manager , 2015

9. Roles for brokers
We return, therefore, to the role of the urban observatory
executive as catalyst. (s)He is part diplomat, trying to bring
various factions together in a situation in which they will
respect and work with each other. He is also part strategist,
to the end that academic, city hall, and all the publics and
participants can cooperate... Such a man (person) must
have tact, imagination, drive, and managerial acumen.
Marshal Dimmock, 1972 cited in Barnes, 1974

10. Universities have always been full of people who want to change the
world. Their new enthusiasm for a growing civic role for their
institution reflects the growing expectation that they will do this in a
more active and less accidental way in future. …
The university of the future will need to regard its local setting as
inherent to its operations, with financial, business and cultural
exchanges, a range of joint and part-time working arrangements, and
a flow of formal and informal contacts. Cities and universities will
need to set priorities jointly…and work together to achieve them… in
the knowledge that this new activity benefits both sides and is
recognised as a core activity for cities and universities alike
(Tewdr-Jones & Godard, 2016:5 )
Roles for Civic universities

11. http://www.carnegieuktrust.org.uk/carnegieuktrust/wp-
content/uploads/sites/64/2016/04/LOW-RES-2578-Carnegie-Interaction.pdf
Source: Shucksmith, 2016

12. Source: Shucksmith, 2016

13. http://www.urbaninformatics.net/
QUT Urban Informatics Lab

14. Contact zones

15. Institutional form
NESTA, 2014 (Tewdr-Jones
and Goddard)

16. Circuits of credibility (1)

18. Urban living labs
• A living lab is a platform/project with a specifically territorial focus which
works across the sectoral and institutional boundaries of partners or
stakeholders. Labs are also often thematically focused and many operate
within the “smart city space” (so with technology components) or on
“sustainability” questions. There is often a practical and direct civic component
to the work of a living lab with “users” represented at all levels of the living
lab. Labs have often emerged from a citizen/activist context, and it is
symptomatic of their maturation as an institutional form that researchers, and
latterly research policy has been interested in their potential. Living labs are
closely connected with Open Social Learning and Open Innovation (OI2 in
European terms) and with forms of “quadruple helix thinking” which blends
actors from market, state, research base and civil society. At times labs have
been linked with specific objectives as diverse as; product testing for tech
companies, behaviour change around transport modalities and energy usage,
use of generic drugs to combat HIV, plan-making and zoning, and in animating
university partnerships.

20. Emergent university
research/policy entities

21. Urban Living Pilots
Urban living pilots
Best embedded in
civic university models
- Newcastle city futures
- City redi at birmingham

22. • Urban/ Living Labs are well established ways of
working in which partnerships and networks between
research, industry, civic and community sectors
(usually some of not all) harness collective learning.
There is a wide array of practice under the loose
banner of urban/living labs. Labs may operate at any
spatial scale, from neighbourhood to whole world and
are incredible sensitive to context
• Productively they can bring together the research
ecosystem and the innovation ecosystem; two areas of
activity that overlap but that have significantly
different roots in government policy and funding
streams.

23. • Reflecting the distinctive backgrounds of ‘urban labs’ the nature of
disruption and innovation they promote varies significantly. Some
rely on directly commissioned research to generate tightly specified
end goals on a contractual basis. Other models are closer to ‘blue
skies’ or fundamental research that depend less on contractual
relations and more on trust and partnerships built up between new
institutions, research cultures and governance innovation over
longer periods of time.
• Cities must be viewed as primary partners in the initiatives. As such
there ought to be less focus on the development of research
questions per se and more on economic drivers for cities, Invest to
save principles and budgets, and the possibility for disruption,
experimentation and innovation in improving public services. And
further Institutions neither inside nor outside the academy ought
be supported to guard against ‘extractive’ relationships with city
partners.

25. Platforms (international)

26. Lessons / emergent findings
• International exemplars
– Surveys of labs emphases heterogenity of
practices
– Fundamental and radical version of co-production
changes power structures and political economy
of research enterprise
• Brokerage function valued and emphasised
• Place-based intellectual leadership from civic
universities

27. platforms
Need links between research, impact
and innovation through platforms that blend;
- research centre
- policy unit
- think tank
- consultancy
- start up/spin-out
- laboratory
- Observatory
- mechanism for public participation
- activist networks

28. Intelligent cities then, have
1. Cities as primary partners
2. Institutions neither inside nor outside the academy
3. City hall and intelligent cities: flexibility, city futures,
international learning
4. The economic drivers for cities clearly defined
a) Invest to save principles and budgets
b) Disruptive innovation
c) Experimentation and innovation
5. Global learning, national delivery, locally embedded