THE URBAN LAB: Imaginative Work in the City

Abstract

The authors would like to thank all respondents for their kind collaboration through interviews, public performances and workshops (both public and by invitation) during this research. We are grateful to the Field Consortium and AIR for their hospitality and openness. We would like to thank Prof. Antoinette de Bont, Prof. Roland Bal, Dr. Lieke Oldenhof and Dr. Hester van de Bovenkamp for their thoughtful feedback and encouragement. We also thank Wouter Berkhout who, as an intern at our faculty, worked with the first author in the early stages of the fieldwork. Finally, we are especially grateful to the two IJURR reviewers who provided us with excellent feedback and kind encouragement that helped us in developing our argument. This research was partly funded by the NWA-agenda 'Towards resilient societies' and the article was written as part of the first author's PhD research which foregrounds processes of urban governance in different experimental sites in the city, NWA Startimpuls PROJECT 'JOIN: Young people in a resilient society. New arrangements for inclusivity and participation' (file number 400.17.603).

Collective Creativity and Complexity in Urban Laboratories: El Campo de Cebada

“…'El Campo de Cebada' has been chosen as a case study (Figure 2), located in the neighbourhood of Madrid, not because it is a common space, but an "urban experience based on community, inclusion, and connection, and not just the cold and individualistic logic of capitalistic speculation" [92]. Despite its very innovative and risky approaches, it has proved long-term stability and great success within the community [16], with a guild of collectives with a large trajectory of social success, from its beginning in 2010 until its closing in 2017. "El Campo de Cebada is a critical position that is woven together to build positive actions.…”

“…This involves reclaiming the 'right to the city' [2][3][4][5][6], where citizens can participate in the construction and management of urban spaces; designing collaboratively [7][8][9][10][11][12][13], including the diverse perspectives of all stakeholders; using urban laboratories [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] as experimental spaces that promote citizen participation, innovation, and co-creation; and harnessing the temporary use of spaces [24][25][26][27][28] as a reuse of abandoned or obsolete spaces to revitalise them and generate new opportunities.…”

Reimagining Urban Living Labs: Enter the Urban Drama Lab

“…To understand how the Urban Drama Lab might enable a new manifestation of the Urban Living Lab, in this part we scrutinise how the laboratory – as a constitutive component of both Urban Living Labs and Urban Drama Labs – can be understood as a liminal space (Larsen and Frandsen, 2022; Oldenhof et al, 2020; Rahmawan-Huizenga and Ivanova, 2022; Thomassen, 2014). We argue that the Urban Drama Lab, by enabling a performative model of the lab, engages with liminality as tension and thus works as an active and generative force in questioning given claims about stakeholders and interests.…”

Imagineering the city: the living lab mystique and its discontents

“…In answering it, we attempt to go deeper into their motivations and practices. While our complete analysis of these lab initiatives was presented elsewhere [Rahmawan-Huizenga & Ivanova, 2022], we focus in this essay on the place-layers we encountered and unravel these carefully, in order to situate the lab in an ontological analysis. Importantly, these labs are not meant to be representative of urban and living labs elsewhere, but rather aim to provide a blueprint for (re-)considering how the label of 'lab' has consequences for its practices, and in particular for excluding audiences from urban participation.…”

“…Our experiences with studying these initiatives point to their monolithic image both in the field and in academia, where attention is (rightly) paid to the types of knowledge they produce, while the question of what kind of place labs are is often left unasked. This is not to say that there are no critical examinations of labs in the literature [Rahmawan-Huizenga & Ivanova, 2022;Karvonen & van Heur, 2014;James Evans & Karvonen, 2014;Bulkeley & Castán Broto, 2013;Bulkeley et al, 2016;Oldenhof, Rahmawan-Huizenga, van de Bovenkamp & Bal, 2020], yet more work needs to be done in linking such examinations to particular social issues, such as urban participation, lab literacy or myth-making.…”