Urban Living Labs in times of post-pandemic epistemic injustices: a speculative realist revision

Abstract

The Urban Living Lab (ULL) is an aspirational device to materialize practices designed around co- production, participation, and transformation in the public arena. It is a research approach that emphasizes short-lived in-situ collaborations purified from the wider ex-situ political and social reality. This approach can strengthen epistemic trust injustices and harms by enforcing an overbearing mode of consensus-seeking participation around dominant epistemic regimes. This paper formulates an alternative, speculative realist approach to the ULL and analyses an ethnographic vignette to explore the intricacies, ambiguities, and disagreements within a post- pandemic ULL-situation in a community playground in Rotterdam South. Through these analyses, this paper takes inventory of matters of care in this stigmatized territory to show how an ULL might be done if it is to generate epistemic justice and social transformation.