INTRODUCTION
Today the city stands out as hubs of commerce, transportation, communication and flow of finance. Overlapping and intersecting flows of ideas, knowledge, people, money, goods and services into an expanding global network of exchange.
The future will be urban for a majority of people, the solution of the greatest issues facing humans_poverty, climate change, health care, education_must be found in city life. Traditional urban development solutions, although they need a lot of time and investment, cannot be the exact way of dealing with metropolitan challenges related to mobility, density, safety, pollution, climate, environmental protection, etc. For cities to address complex urbanization and environmental challenges of the future, there is a need to constantly seek out viable new ideas, technologies and smarter solutions.
There are other challenges in the context of today’s urban planning and design that make the understanding of an urban problem even harder.
- Highly conflicting visions
- No straightforward solution
- Top-down decision getting unpopular
- Flexibility and changing environment
In this table, the city is defined as a background for overcoming conflicts between the existing regime and niche innovations in order to facilitate the transition process.
HYPOTHESIS
Both policymakers and the public speak of the need to better understand the urban ecosystem, yet examples of urban models and scenarios that shed a light on this issue remain relatively few in numbers. A long term Socio-technical and ecological program is required to transform urban systems and how the city inhabitants have chosen to use these systems.
We realized that most of the planning ended up being short term and the changes were concentrated at the neighborhood level. We would like to see more mega scale global projects for redevelopment. However, With increasing global competition, maintaining our economic competitiveness will be even more critical to attract growth opportunities and create more high-value jobs.
Another question is how to provide economic prosperity and social cohesion while achieving environmental sustainability? The answer however is quite complex, but it is clear that we can no longer afford to wait to change. Actions and solutions are small which can curb but not reverse the city’s unsustainable pattern of development. It is important to align resources, regulations and legislations with urban sustainability principles.
To enhance the quality of life and empower the urban environment, the solution is to raise social awareness about how people and their innovation can be used for urban service delivery in their city and environmental challenges. This is a collaborative work done by considering the role of research centers in linking people and their talents to the professional world. Here, users become equal contributors rather than subjects of study.
This interpretation is based on a progressive and human-centric perspective of ICT-driven urban innovation and development, and the balanced combination of human, social, cultural, environmental, economic, and technological aspects. Therefore increasing feasibility and adaptability of urban projects by including ways to crowdsource and crowdfund them.
This linkage between people and authorities, experts and industries, could capture a more integrated way of understanding the influence of various social, economic and environmental factors in urban policy-making and management.
PROCEDURE
Because change in a city is costly (in many ways) and can be especially challenging for early adopters, it is important that the results of urban experimentation be shared, helping to foster less expensive and more easily replicable solutions. Suitable solutions can be unlocked by gathering evidence, evaluating the quality, multidisciplinary and collaborative knowledge sharing, and building capacity. All of this could not be achieved unless we test and implement the solutions in a real-life and real-time situation.
Due to this unprecedented condition of the Covid19 pandemic, we are observing that a lot of cities are investing in the best policies and initiatives that they learned from other cities’ experiences. In this time when Covid19 has influenced many aspects of our lives including work from home and social distancing regulations, top-down approaches to urban management are obsolete and urban design methods are required to be reviewed for achieving a more resilient city and a better quality of life.
We need comprehensive cooperation between organizations and urban managers. We should establish an interagency initiative, the environment that will encourage, coordinate, and support efforts to pioneer new models for bottom-up, technology-enhanced cities incorporating goals for inclusion and equity, sustainability and leadership.
Finding different and successful solutions for linking urban design results to citizens can empower them to identify low-quality environments and turn them into a political force against urban environment degradation. In this way, the city is used as a frame and a laboratory for social interaction and intervention, which can handle the growing mismatch between outdated government policy and demand for infrastructure, housing and amenities.
RESULTS
The urban living lab is an approach to manage innovation and urban transformation processes in which individual users and relevant stakeholders are involved to co-create, test, implement, evaluate innovations in real-life situations and open-source conditions to generate sustainable value. A living lab is established to improve technology and innovation management, livability, public-private partnership and it is aiming toward giving local players, citizens and entrepreneurs the means to build the city that truly suits their needs and provide our know-how to enable public authorities, businesses and society as a whole to better anticipate the future.
URBAN LIVING LAB
On one hand, cities worldwide face some of the most pressing sustainability challenges regarding energy consumption, air and water pollution, urbanization and livability, and have started to design and deploy localized responses to address these transformative pressure, on the other hand, the latest research has pointed to the importance of cities in the transition process, arguing that urban areas may contain the necessary resources, spaces and interconnections of various sectors and actors that will enable innovation.
It is important to have a clear idea of how the learning produced by urban living labs can be incorporated into broader activities, policies or strategies to scale up impacts and transform practice. Knowledge and experience of a ULL can be utilized before and after the assessment phase to support funding applications and assist with prioritization of projects.
CONCLUSION
Urban living labs have the potential to repoliticize urban development. Recently a policy need for new approaches found ground in emerging and planned experimentations in living labs. Experiments for urban regeneration focused on establishing a connection between residents of the area and ideas for refurbishing public areas and left behind underused infrastructure.
In urban planning and development, the involvement of citizens calls for a more sophisticated response to complex challenges which stretches beyond surveys and focus groups. Urban Living Labs (ULL) opens up a forum or space for greater involvement of citizens and other stakeholders. Some more urban related aspects highlighted in the definition of ULL which is an environment where citizens participate in designing solutions, it’s a way to co-construct the city with citizens to experiment ideas in a shared long-term program of activities, getting people involved in creating their future.
