Urban Living Labs, Circular Economy and Nature-Based Solutions: Ideation and Testing of a New Soil in the City of Turin Using a Multi-stakeholder Perspective

Abstract

In the attempt to foster circular economy (CE), cities are increasingly adopting urban living labs (ULLs) as sites of co-production aimed at testing alternative solutions based on the reuse of products, reduction of consumption and recycling of materials. Taking this perspective, our study adopts an exploratory research design to discover the pragmatic implications emerging from a case study. The City of Turin joined proGIreg, a European project that entails the regeneration of former industrial districts by means of nature-based solutions (NBS). Ranging from aquaponics to green roofs, seven NBS have been experimented in Turin, which rely on the use of natural systems to tackle social, economic and environmental challenges efficiently and sustainably. Among them, the most promising is related to the production and test of the ‘new soil’, a blend obtained by mixing earth materials coming from construction sites with compost, zeolites and mycorrhizae. The case herein presented is interesting to analyse for the multi-stakeholder management setting used, where public institutions, private companies, research institutions, citizens and associations collaborated in the co-creation and testing phase of the NBS. Consequently, the data collected through participant observation and direct interviews allow researchers to describe multi-stakeholders’ dynamics and how they work. Thus, this paper narrates a micro-contextual experience while providing a critique. Results include an analysis of the unique combination of different stakeholders, which strongly impacted on the management and the effectiveness of the entire project. By consequence, the paper offers both theoretical contributions to the relational branch of stakeholder theory and practical evidence in demonstrating the importance of the relational branch of the theory over a more traditional transactional view.

Territorial Dynamics Supported by a Collaborative Network of Innovation Labs: Toward an Approach to Establish a Portfolio of Indicators to Monitor and Assess their Territorial Impact

“…The first literature review was realized with the RE 1 (Table 1), about the link between innovation lab networks and territorial dynamics. The evolution of IL network publications in a territory (equation 1) (curve 2) was compared with the trend in global publications 5 (line 1) (Figure 2). The number of international articles on IL has grown significantly since 2012.…”

“…IL could play a role to promote knowledge sharing and exchange for regional innovation by integrating university, public institutions, government, firms and endusers. "The collaborative interaction among all the participants focused on generating an 'innovation policy'" (Ascione, 2021) "The city, through a multi-stakeholder management setting, has guaranteed a public and democratic participation of a wide range of interests. Moreover, with the ULL, the city has reinvigorated the public interest towards the purpose of limiting the depletion of scarce resources, and it has played an active role in promoting a factual change in the regulation not only for the benefit of the project but also for all the private actors operating in the backfilling soil market."…”

Reviving Urban Greening in Post-Industrial Landscapes: The Case of Turin

“…The "living lab" definition of MIT inspired ULLs at an urban scale as participatory modes of urban regeneration, particularly in degraded post-industrial areas [34]. Multistakeholder engagement through the co-production of innovative solutions for challenges such as social consumption and erosion, food access, and social policies in real time is at the heart of this definition [35].…”

Clustering Business Models of Heterogeneous Nature-Based Solutions Implementing Innovative Governance and Financing Concepts

“…The soil in post-industrial areas is often contaminated with pollutants, sealed, or compressed. Therefore, carbon-neutral methods to restore soil and its fertility are developed in the NBS type "New regenerated soil (S)" by using deep excavation soils as a main resource for the creation of new, high-quality soil [24,25]. In addition to restoration, shared land uses such as "Community-based farms and gardens" (NBS type UA) enable turning un-or barely-used urban land into productive community gardens [26].…”