City Labs as Vehicles for Innovation in Urban Planning Processes

Abstract

This paper assesses the role of urban experiments for local planning processes through a case-based analysis of the city lab of Maastricht. In conjunction with this, the article offers three contributions, as additional elements. Firstly, the paper develops a set of defining characteristics of city labs as an analytical concept which is relevant for discussions about (collaborative) planning. Secondly, it refines the literature on collaborative planning by drawing attention to experimentation and innovation. Thirdly, the paper assesses the potential of city labs to contribute to the innovation of urban governance. The work draws from the literature on experimentation and learning as well as the literature on collaborative urban planning. In the conclusions, we discuss the potential of city labs as vehicles for learning about new urban planning approaches and their limitations as spaces for small-scale experimentation. The paper is based on research for the URB@Exp research project funded by JPI Urban Europe.

Smart Cities: Towards a New Citizenship Regime? A Discourse Analysis of the British Smart City Standard

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(Smart) Citizens from Data Providers to Decision-Makers? The Case Study of Barcelona

“…By contrast, and consciously in response to this technodeterministic approach [57], a critical and evolutionary transition known as experimental cities recently surfaced in cities such as Barcelona. It is characterized by initiatives encompassing (i) the awareness of the technopolitics of data for citizens [58]; (ii) potential alternative economics for city policies [39]; (iii) citizen engagement as a democratic practice [59][60][61][62]; (iv) multi-stakeholder schemes as a pervasive governance logic [34]; and (v) living lab initiatives as sites devised to design, test, and learn from social and technical innovation in real time [29,30,[63][64][65][66][67][68][69]. This emergent amalgamation of initiatives surrounding the experimental urbanism trend regards urban transformations as inherently interdisciplinary, data-intensive, and embedded in place.…”

A new role for citizens’ initiatives: the difficulties in co-creating institutional change in urban planning

“…As digital technologies continue to make information more accessible, both the demand for cocreation and the potential of its contributions are likely to increase even more in the near future (Fung 2015). Research on participatory and collaborative governance in planning (Healey 1997(Healey , 1998(Healey , 2003Innes and Booher 2010), more recently complemented by related literature on co-creation (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012;Scholl and Kemp 2016), reveals that, despite often high ambitions, there are significant challenges and sometimes participation is simply not effective as Innes and Booher (2004, 419) bluntly state: "Legally required methods of public participation in government decision making in the USA -public hearings, review and comment procedures in particular -do not work." Partly as a response to the perceived failures of downstream implementation of participatory mechanisms, an increasing amount of citizens' initiatives step up to deal with (local) urban planning issues themselves (Healey 2015;Fung 2015;Van Meerkerk, Boonstra, and Edelenbos 2013).…”