The Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions (GUST) project will organize a dialogue session at the International Sustainability Transitions Conference on 18-21 June 2017 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Urban living labs are proliferating across Europe as a means for testing innovations in buildings, transport and energy systems. They refer to governance and policy experiments that draw on urban sites devised to design, test and learn from social and technical innovation in real time and in real places. This dialogue session seeks to act as a boundary spanner between scholars that have done research on urban living labs and research and innovation policy respectively. We propose to explore the potential for bringing these two bodies of work together in order to integrate knowledge about the conditions and contexts within which urban living labs are designed, the agency and power dynamics involved in the everyday working of urban living labs, and the processes by which they are (and are not) translated into urban and policy domains. Despite the experimentation taking place on the ground, there is a lack of systematic learning across urban and national contexts. This dialogue session will address the design, practices and processes of urban living labs.

Link to GUST 

Link to IST