From Freight Partnerships to City Logistics Living Labs – Giving Meaning to the Elusive Concept of Living Labs

The paper discusses the growing importance of urban freight research given the increasing urban population trends. The complexity of urban freight systems means that it is essential for the public and private sectors to work together - one way to achieve this has been through freight partnerships. A short review of freight partnerships highlights the way in which they have fostered mutual understanding among urban freight stakeholders. The literature on shared situational awareness (SSA) and joint knowledge production (JKP) has been adapted to position freight partnerships and to further develop and link these partnerships to the concept of a living laboratory concerned with urban freight transport. This novel application of the living lab concept is introduced. Next, the first phases of a city logistics living lab brought in practice in Rotterdam are shortly mentioned. The living lab concept fits the complexities of the urban freight system well and has been a cornerstone of a recently started major freight project in the EU (CITYLAB)

Diálogos democráticos que fazem funcionar as cidades

The field of Strategic Design supports designers in researching and designing for the complexity of today’s cities by embracing the idea of strategic dialogue, in which designers align with different actors and their interests. In this article, we discuss how democratic dialogues – foregrounded in the Participatory Design (PD) tradition – play a role in complex urban design processes (i.e. ‘infrastructuring’) and entail different types of dialogues of which strategic dialogue is merely one. After framing Strategic Design and PD, we describe five designer roles and their associated dialogues. This description forms the basis of an exploratory typology of democratic dialogues that was applied and exemplified in a case study about a Living Lab in the neighbourhood of Genk. The Lab attempts to design alternative futures for work in the city together with citizens, public and private organisations. We claim that engaging with this typology allows designers to understand and design infrastructuring processes in the urban context and to open up different design dialogues and roles for discussion.Keywords: democratic dialogues, living lab, urban context, designer roles, infrastructuring.O campo do design estratégico apoia o trabalho de designers que pesquisam e projetam para a complexidade das cidades de hoje. De fato, ao abraçar a ideia do diálogo estratégico, os designers se alinham com diferentes atores e seus interesses. Neste artigo, discutimos como diálogos democráticos – que estão em primeiro plano na tradição do Design Participativo (PD) – são relevantes em processos complexos de design urbano (ou seja, de “infraestruturação”) e implicam diferentes tipos de diálogos, entre os quais o diálogo estratégico é apenas um. Depois de enquadrar Design Estratégico e PD, descrevemos cinco papéis do designer e seus relativos diálogos. Esta descrição constitui a base de uma tipologia exploratória de diálogos democráticos que foi aplicada e exemplificada em um estudo de caso sobre um Living Lab, no bairro de Genk. O Lab tenta projetar futuros alternativos para o trabalho na cidade, juntamente com os cidadãos, organizações públicas e privadas. Afirmamos que se envolver com esta tipologia permite que os designers entendam e projetem processos de infraestruturação no contexto urbano e se abram para diferentes diálogos de design e papéis para a discussão.Palavras-chave: diálogos democráticos, living lab, contexto urbano, papéis do designer, infraestruturação

Structured Collaboration Across a Transformative Knowledge Network-Learning Across Disciplines, Cultures and Contexts?

Realising the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will require transformative changes at micro, meso and macro levels and across diverse geographies. Collaborative, transdisciplinary research has a role to play in documenting, understanding and contributing to such transformations. Previous work has investigated the role of this research in Europe and North America, however the dynamics of transdisciplinary research on ‘transformations to sustainability’ in other parts of the world are less well-understood. This paper reports on an international project that involved transdisciplinary research in six different hubs across the globe and was strategically designed to enable mutual learning and exchange. It draws on surveys, reports and research outputs to analyse the processes of transdisciplinary collaboration for sustainability that took place between 2015-2019. The paper illustrates how the project was structured in order to enable learning across disciplines, cultures and contexts, and describes how it also provided for the negotiation of epistemological frameworks and different normative commitments between members across the network. To this end, it discusses lessons regarding the use of theoretical and methodological anchors, multi-loop learning and evaluating emergent change (including the difficulties encountered). It offers insights for the design and implementation of future international transdisciplinary collaborations that address locally-specific sustainability challenges within the universal framework of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

Co-production for innovation: the urban living lab experience

Urban Living Labs (ULLs) are public spaces where local authorities engage citizens to develop innovative urban services. Their strength and popularity stem from a methodology based on open innovation, experimentation, and citizen engagement. Although the ULL methodology is supposed to largely adopt a co-production approach, connections between the two have not yet been thoroughly investigated. The paper seeks to fill this gap by examining through a qualitative analysis three experiences of ULLs made in Amsterdam, Boston and Turin. Specifically, the paper aims to assess whether ULLs can be really conceptualised as a form of co-production and, if so, which elements characterised them as innovative in comparison to \u2018mainstreaming\u2019 co-production; Then it analyses benefits and drawbacks related to their implementation

Beyond Green: The Arts as a Catalyst for Sustainability

The creative sector has played a significant role in efforts to raise awareness of the impacts of climate change and encourage sustainable social, economic, and environmental practices worldwide. Many artists and cultural organizations have embarked on remarkable projects that make us reflect on our behaviors, our carbon footprints, and the claims of infinite growth based on finite resources. Sometimes treading a fine line between arts and advocacy, they have sparked extraordinary collaborations that reveal new ways of living together on a shared planet. The 'art of the possible' will become even more relevant as 2016 dawns - bringing the challenge of how to implement the Sustainable Development Goals and the Climate Change Agreement adopted at the end of 2015. Yet with negotiations overshadowed by scientific controversy, political polemic and geographic polarization, individuals can easily lose faith in their own ability to shape change beyond the hyperlocal level. Against this challenging backdrop, could the arts and creative practice become a particle accelerator - to shift mindsets, embrace new ways of sharing space and resources, and catalyze more creative leadership in the public and private spheres? The goal of this Salzburg Global Seminar session was to build on path-breaking cultural initiatives to advance international and cross-sectoral links between existing arts and sustainability activities around the world, encourage bolder awareness-raising efforts, and recommend strategic approaches for making innovative grassroots to scale for greater, longer-term impact

A Two-Stage Allocation Scheme for Delay-Sensitive Services in Dense Vehicular Networks

Driven by the rapid development of wireless communication system, more and more vehicular services can be efficiently supported via vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications. In order to allocate radio resource with the reasonable implementation complexity in dense urban intersection, a two-stage allocation algorithm is proposed in this paper, whose main objective is to minimize delay and ensure reliability. In particular, as for the first stage, the allocation policy is based on traffic density information (TDI), which is different from utilizing channel state information (CSI) and queue state information (QSI) in the second stage. Moreover, in order to reflect the influence of TDI on delay, a macroscopic vehicular mobility model is employed in this paper. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can acquire an asymptotically optimal performance with the acceptable complexity

On the right track? : evaluation as a tool to guide spatial transitions

Spatial developments are becoming more and more non-linear, dynamic and complex with a wide range of possible actors. The awareness of uncertainty in spatial planning is growing and therefore, projects need to integrate a high level of flexibility. But at the same time, a growing demand for taking more informed and well-argued decisions is noticeable. Predictions out of the ‘best estimated model’ are no longer credible and no longer accepted, because they are too fragile and uncertain. How can we keep these long-lasting, multi-actor projects in permanent transition on the right track? This article presents an evaluation methodology that goes beyond the traditional, rational evaluation attitudes with a low level of flexibility being too linear to match the current spatial developments. There is a need for more interrelated, alert and flexible means of evaluation, co-evolving with the processes and current dynamics in spatial planning. Therefore, different evaluation approaches are introduced, depending on the specific interdependencies of the object of evaluation and its context. Subsequently, the theoretical framework is translated towards a more practical level. A case study conducted in Flanders illustrates the current spatial developments and a possible evaluation approach, incorporated from the beginning of the process, to guide this kind of projects

VR/Urban: spread.gun - design process and challenges in developing a shared encounter for media façades

Designing novel interaction concepts for urban environments is not only a technical challenge in terms of scale, safety, portability and deployment, but also a challenge of designing for social configurations and spatial settings. To outline what it takes to create a consistent and interactive experience in urban space, we describe the concept and multidisciplinary design process of VR/Urban's media intervention tool called Spread.gun, which was created for the Media Façade Festival 2008 in Berlin. Main design aims were the anticipation of urban space, situational system configuration and embodied interaction. This case study also reflects on the specific technical, organizational and infrastructural challenges encountered when developing media façade installations

From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design

As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain "ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources, environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c