Search results

Co-Creation Dynamics in Urban Living Labs

Citizens and urban policy makers are experimenting with collaborative ways to tackle wicked urban issues, such as today’s sustainability challenges. In this article, we consider one particular way of collaboration in an experimental setting: Urban Living Labs (ULLs). ULLs are understood as spatially embedded sites for the co-creation of knowledge and solutions by conducting local experiments. As such, ULLs are supposed to offer an arena for reflexive, adaptive, and multi-actor learning environments, where new practices of self-organization and novel (infra-) structures can be tested within their real-world context. Yet, it remains understudied how the co-creation of knowledge and practices actually takes place within ULLs, and how co-creation unfolds their impacts. Hence, this paper focuses on co-creation dynamics in urban living labs, its associated learning and knowledge generation, and how these possibly contribute to urban sustainability transitions. We analyzed empirical data from a series of in-depth interviews and were actively involved with ULLs in the Rotterdam-The Hague region in the Netherlands. Our findings show five distinct types of co-creation elements that relate to specific dynamics of participation, facilitation, and organization. We conclude with a discussion on the ambivalent role of contextualized knowledge and the implications for sustainability transitions.

Keys to the community

Proefschrift van drs. Jeroen Gradener naar de legitimiteit van community development (opbouwwerk). Niet vanzelf krijgen opbouwwerkers een mandaat van bewoners om hen te ondersteunen in het verbeteren van hun eigen leven en hun leefomgeving. Hoe deze opbouwwerkers erin slagen om ondanks weerstanden hun legitimiteit als professional te ontwikkelen is onderwerp van het internationaal vergelijkend promotieonderzoek.

Identifying the merits of bottom-up urban development

Comprehensive understanding of the merits of bottom-up urban development is lacking, thus hampering and complicating associated collaborative processes. Therefore, and given the assumed relevancies, we mapped the social, environmental and economic values generated by bottom-up developments in two Dutch urban areas, using theory-based evaluation principles. These evaluations raised insights into the values, beneficiaries and path dependencies between successive values, confirming the assumed effect of placemaking accelerating further spatial developments. It also revealed broader impacts of bottom-up endeavors, such as influences on local policies and innovations in urban development.

Governance of urban collectives in Amsterdam

Across European cities local entrepreneurs are joining forces in new ways, forming collectives to stimulate business growth and innovation and to create a more attractive business environment. The value of such collectives is increasingly recognized by local governments and policy measures to stimulate these initiatives are being developed. Amsterdam hosts different collaborative initiatives, including 39 business improvement districts (BIDs).The Knowledge Mile is such a collective in which shopkeepers, other local SMEs, residents work together to collectively improve a large retail area. The city of Amsterdam is also a stakeholder. Government can fill an important role in enabling the creation of collective resource management in urban settings. However, if effective regulation is missing, citizens and governing bodies have to look for incentives to find new means of addressing governance. As such, the potential for collective management of urban commons may be greater than realized so far, as there is still a lack of knowledge in this area. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap. By means of an embedded case study approach, we analyze the interaction between the stakeholders in their development of a green zone, the Knowledge Mile Park, in the Wibautstraat. In the coming years, roofs, facades and ground level will be changed through a collaboration of residents, entrepreneurs, researchers, civil servants and students in a metropolitan Living Lab. In this Living Lab, solutions for a healthy and social environment, climate resistance and biodiversity are jointly developed, tested and shown. In our study, we will analyze the role of the governing bodies in such initiatives, and make recommendations how collectives can become more mainstream with new kinds of institutions, without an undue burden on the community.

“Who doesn’t think about technology when designing urban environments for older people?”

The World Health Organization (WHO) strives to assist and inspire cities to become more “age-friendly”, and the fundamentals are included in the Global Age-Friendly Cities Guide. An age-friendly city enables residents to grow older actively within their families, neighbourhoods and civil society, and oers extensive opportunities for the participation of older people in the community. Over the decades, technology has become essential for contemporary and future societies, and even more imperative as the decades move on, given we are nearly in our third decade of the twenty-first century. Yet, technology is not explicitly considered in the 8-domain model by the WHO, which describes an age-friendly city. This paper discusses the gaps in the WHO’s age-friendly cities model in the field of technology and provides insights and recommendations for expansion of the model for application in the context of countries with a high human development index that wish to be fully age-friendly. This work is distinctive because of the proposed new age-friendly framework, and the work presented in this paper contributes to the fields of gerontology, geography urban and development, computer science, and gerontechnology. Original article at MDPI; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16193525 (This article belongs to the Special Issue Quality of Life: The Interplay between Human Behaviour, Technology and the Environment)

The value of FM for a healthy urban environment