Urban living labs: Catalysing low carbon and sustainable cities in Europe?

Living labs for sustainability, low carbon and smart cities that have emerged in Europe have different goals and ways of working, they are initiated by various actors, and they form different types of partnerships. There is clearly no uniform definition of living labs (Hillgren, 2013; Schliwa, 2013; Ståhlbröst, 2008). Some scholars and organisations define them as partnerships between sectors (often between public, private and people) (Börjeson, 2008; EC, 2015; European Network of Living Labs [ENoLL], 2015; Rösch and Kaltschmitt, 1999) where universities play a key role (Evans and Karvonen, 2010), while others look at living labs more in the light of pilot and demonstration projects, which function as supportive tools for private actors and industry helping them commercialise their services, products and technology (Hellström Reimer, McCormick, Nilsson and Arsenault., 2012; Kommonen and Botero, 2013). Living labs can be considered both as an arena geographically or institutionally bounded spaces), and as an approach for intentional collaborative experimentation between researchers, citizens, companies, and local governments (Schliwa, 2013).