Urban Living Labs for Planning – Experimentation at the Neighbourhood Level

This thesis explores affordable and sustainable housing by widening the discourse through an investigation of alternative paths to urban development. The main hypothesis is that the global housing crisis is understood as an urban governance crisis, stemming from inequitable decision-making processes in planning. By investigating innovative and place-based models for citizen participation in urban governance and planning, this approach provides opportunities for a critical reflection of the role of the spatial planning discipline in the development of housing with a focus on collaborative governance processes and institutional innovation.

Power imbalances in sustainable development as a whole have mostly excluded the citizen stakeholders in agenda-setting processes. This problem reframes the housing problem by focusing on aspects of social justice and decision-making practices that impact equitable access to housing, urban social infrastructure and revisit the concept of neighbourhood planning as a collaborative effort. Furthermore, this research deals with co-production processes in socio-ecological experiments at the neighbourhood level, involving alternative affordable housing environments. It is therefore important to dive deeper in the reality of challenges to collaboration between citizens and the local authority.

There is a growing momentum in housing research that is more focused on the social, institutional and decision-making dimensions of housing and neighbourhood planning. However, there are two areas of research which have remained separate from the realm of housing and planning studies which by their connection, present great potential for producing new knowledge, expanding current disciplinary and methodological limits. Firstly, the concept of social infrastructure as a set of social relations and interactions with physical resources (including housing) that are co-created by both state and non-state actors. Secondly, innovation in urban governance at the neighbourhood/block level utilising the methodologies of urban experimentation, action research and collaborative approaches to neighbourhood planning.

This specifically involves the development of a conceptual framework which integrates the concepts of social sustainability, collaborative governance, experimentation in urban planning and the urban commons. An Urban Living Lab (ULL) is organised in a typical residential, suburban setting in Cyprus in order to investigate collaboration between the municipality and other stakeholders at the neighbourhood level. Arguably, the most important characteristic of ULLs is their function as platforms to bring actors from local authorities (and other public organisations), academia, citizens and businesses together in new ways. The Latsia municipality will serve as the first location for the investigation.

The specific aims of the context-driven research are to (a) analyse the local challenges regarding housing and social infrastructure from the perspective of citizens (users); (b) mobilise community self-organisation to investigate citizen engagement in co-production of social infrastructures; (c) explore innovative, collaborative governance arrangements between citizens and local government; (d) reveal the contextual factors which matter the most when bringing different stakeholders together to co-produce solutions to urban problems.

Research question: Which ULL methods, organisational structures and scales of co-production facilitate experimentation in planning leading to socially sustainable housing environments?

Research Sub-questions:

• Through which social infrastructure resources can communities connect the realm of the household to the realm of the neighbourhood?
• Which common goals can be decided by participants in order to initiate self-organisation towards co-production of social infrastructures?
• How does the co-production of local knowledge proliferate and how does this process alter the perceptions that citizens and public officials have on co-production?
• What organisational structure can facilitate the collaboration between local government officials and citizens for the co-production of social infrastructure?

Publications