An urban living lab is a local experiment to test new combinations of technologies, but also new social activities in combination with technologies. A living laboratory means that the subjects of your experiments are in this way the living beings, humans, or people. They can be represented by various forms, can be a street, a building, can be a district in the city, and so on. But what we're interested in researching about urban living labs is the way in which these deliberate interventions in cities are being used as a vehicle to try to address sustainability challenges. We want to see the urban living lab as a new type of experimental intervention that can have the potential to renew and revitalize urban governance for cities. We know that more people are living in cities today than ever before, and we know that we have really strong sustainability issues to have to address. From water through to congestion, through to how we use energy. This is exciting because urban living laboratories are now being thought of as a way we can bring these things together really to improve the urban environment for people. In a nutshell, GUST project hopes to achieve a better understanding on the role of urban living labs. To develop structured with practice examples in order to have a better knowledge about how to negotiate, how to manage living gaps in the future. You look at a variety of urban living laboratories and see how effective they are in actually trying to achieve these ambitions that they have to improve conditions around sustainability and to foster learning. But at the same time is an experimental, so that means try something that has not been tried before. A new approach to deal with a challenge, to deal with a need that comes from urban societies. By learning and knowing more about urban living labs, we can suggest pathways for sustainability transitions in cities, not just in Europe, but in the whole world. So we'll be looking both at the learning that's happening within cities, but also about how learning can be transferred between cities. Is it possible to scale it up to share the lessons? Our ambition is to not only understand what an urban living lab is about, but also what impact is going to have for local governance. The City of Malmo. Milton Keynes. One from Vienna. Veerkracht Carnisse in Rotterdam. The house called [inaudible] or sustainability was designed to test the technology of using smart metering in the housing sector. Designs for buildings that were energy-efficient were first tried out in Milton Keynes. Vienna has a collection of citizens that have a migrant background. They haven't been in Austria. So they are starting to initiate interactions through diversity, which means they are trying to make our benefit out of diversity in a specific quarter. A neighborhood that has people live very close to each other, but then there's all these disagreement about how to use the common urban space. Eight families are now living there and they are collecting data on the use of smart technologies, which the families were provided with on their instantaneous energy use and water use and so on. Now Milton Keynes is undertaking a small grid demonstration project, and other trials of different ways of using smart technology. So it's completely different approach, but it's also living like because it's social innovation, it's interaction, it's involvement of citizens, but involving also stakeholders. It's the city, it's some NGOs being active there. But at the same time turning the tide towards more welcoming neighborhoods. That they are one of the cases that we're going to be looking at and seeing whether there's something about Milton Keynes history as a place of experimentation over time. That means that urban living laboratories can work really well there, and what we might learn from their past as well to take into the future around the design of urban living labs. Of course, it can't be one setup of a living lab of how can we use space in a way that benefits different groups, that brings environmental benefits and social benefits together. My task as a work practice leader is to try to bring together a whole set of different perspectives that we have in the literature already and think about how they can be applied to understand the idea of urban living laboratories. Developing case studies on living labs, you need case studies because living labs are very complex phenomenon, so it's the best way to approach them and then to conduct them in different countries, of course. We're going to look on the processes and the mechanisms that urban living labs can sustain themselves over long time periods, and also how they relate as an intervention, as a group of actors working and learning together with their community around them. Basically we're the project leaders and we are there to ensure that all the data that is collected and analyzed within the three other work packages is consistent and feeding in each other's results. Also we are responsible for the dissemination and communication of the results to companies, to NGOs, to general public, and so on.
