Recasting Urban Governance through Leeds City Lab: Developing Alternatives to Neoliberal Urban Austerity in Co‐production Laboratories

Abstract

This article reports on a research project, Leeds City Lab, that brought together partner organizations to explore the meanings and practices of co‐production in the context of urban change. Our intention is to offer a response to the crisis in urban governance by combining the growing academic and practitioner debates on co‐production and urban laboratories in order to explore radically different institutional personae that can respond to deficits in contemporary urban governance, especially relating to participation and disenfranchisement, and ultimately unlock improved ways of designing, managing and living in cities. Our analysis has identified four key ways in which co‐production labs can recast urban governance to more progressive ends: by moving beyond traditional organizational identities and working practices, embracing grey spaces of new civic interfaces, foregrounding emotions and power and committing to durable solutions. Ultimately, what we point towards is that urban governance can be more effectively enacted in co‐production labs that bring together universities and the public, private and civil society sectors on a basis of equality, trust and openness. These spaces have the potential to unlock a city's knowledge, resources and assets, to unpack complex challenges and to build capacity to deliver improved city‐wide solutions.

Platform urbanism and the Chinese smart city: the co-production and territorialisation of Hangzhou City Brain

“…These can be considered both central to the territorialisation of specific urban platforms (because of their synergistic elements, which can be expressed at the local level through specific strategies, products or forms of service delivery), and to the treatment of urban platforms as experimental. Thus, a focus on City Brain as an experimental platform developed and tested in Hangzhou as a laboratory highlights the linkages between literatures on co-production and on experimental urbanism (Chatterton et al 2018 ). However, while most of the literature on co-production in urban planning, design and implementation in Western contexts describes a key element of the co-production process as openness to citizen input (Bartenberger and Sezściło 2016 ; Voorberg et al 2015 ), in the Chinese case this is limited due to the specific context of China’s urban management system.…”

Building collaborative platforms for urban innovation: Newcastle City Futures as a quadruple helix intermediary

“…Gouvea et al, 2013; Lindberg et al, 2014), and comparable processes of, for instance, participatory urban governance and planning (e.g. Chatterton et al, 2018) or formation of a regional smart specialisation strategy (Aranguren et al, 2019). This reflects the growing value of collaboration beyond individual organisations in response to the uncertainty generated by highly complex societal ‘grand challenges’ at both global and local scales (Ferraro et al, 2015).…”

Urban governance dispositifs: cohering diverse ecologies of urban energy governance

“…Analyses have engaged notably with urban experimentation (Evans et al 2016), coproduction (Chatterton et al 2018) and socio-technologies (Bissell 2018). These developments have been most pronounced in contextual analyses that unpack the urban governance of the smart city (Karvonen et al 2019), climate change (Bulkeley 2015), resilience (Braun 2014) and, pertinent to this paper, energy (Haarstad 2016).…”

“…Engaging with these limitations, recent urban scholarship has sought to capture the new political spaces and practices emerging in the contemporary city and, relatedly, to expand how we conceptualise urban governance and the modes through which is it achieved. Analyses have engaged notably with urban experimentation (Evans et al., 2016), co-production (Chatterton et al., 2018) and socio-technologies (Bissell, 2018). These developments have been most pronounced in contextual analyses that unpack the urban governance of the smart city (Karvonen et al., 2019), climate change (Bulkeley, 2015), resilience (Braun, 2014) and, pertinent to this paper, energy (Haarstad, 2016).…”