Urban living labs (ULLs) can be an important way to approach multi-stakeholder co-creation with regard to urban transitions and transformations. They have become a common type of co-creative experimentation, offering the opportunity to research and innovate on a wide variety of challenges in everyday settings. They test hypotheses to create pathways for a transition to sustainable urbanisation. However, there is mounting concern from practice, innovators, and research that there is little systematic integration of practical outputs. Moreover, the question of how ULLs should be designed, and by whom, requires comparative longer-term assessment. Implementation and operation requires knowledge of the risks involved. The long-term impacts of ULLs on particular places, and the general understanding of how they contribute to urban transformations, are not well theorized. Thus, intended and potential contributions to urban transformations could remain unrealized. Based on experience from a series of stakeholder dialogues and co-production formats at various ULL related conferences and workshop, this paper offers policy recommendations and directions regarding the future direction for JPI Urban Europe its main programme for 2021–2027, the European Partnership Driving Urban Transitions to a Sustainable Future in the Horizon Europe Framework Programme. It may also help other urban research and innovation funders and programming actors support sustainable transformations through urban living labs.

Platform urbanism has emerged in recent years as an area of research into the ways in which digital platforms are increasingly central to the governance, economy, experience, and understanding of the city. In the paper, we argue that platform urbanism is an evolution of the smart city, constituted by novel, digitally-enabled socio-technical assemblages that enable new forms of social, economic and political intermediation. We offer a typological framework for a better conceptualization of platform urbanism and its complex socio-economic relationships. We further outline several directions for future research on platform urbanism, specifically: a.) the need to critically investigate new power geometries of corporate, legal and regulatory alignments; b.) how platform urbanism may be expressed in, and affect, cities in the Global South; c.) how it may need to be critically engaged with in regard to its development in response to emergent events such as the Covid-19 pandemic; and d.) how it may shape visions of the current and future city.

This research focuses on the food, farming and health experiences of two secondary cities of Uganda (Mbale and Mbarara), comparing findings with studies of primary African cities. We draw from survey data, focus groups with healthcare professionals, and in-depth interviews with varied residents. A feminist geographic perspective explored intersections of food, farming and health with varied aspects of identity, and with place (city itself, but also with rural areas). By comparing our secondary city findings to findings from primary African cities this paper sheds light on whether and how food systems in secondary African cities are transforming, and how urban life at this scale is being experienced. Our analysis suggests a good deal of similarity of food insecurity, dietary diversity, and of non-communicable disease experiences and understandings. The main difference was around the food access strategies, the access to land, and the engagement with agriculture and interaction with the rural. How this might change as these secondary cities grow further is not clear but there should not be an assumption that primary city experiences will inevitably be followed. Our findings offer important insights for future research and for those planning for Ugandan and potentially other African secondary city futures. In comparison to primary SSA cities our findings suggest less advance along theorised nutritional transitions (greater hybridity), a higher relevance of the rural for viable urban lives, yet comparable experience of non-communicable disease. This is intriguing, has implications for theory, and warrants further research.

Urbanites increasingly turn to digital mobility platforms to make use of means of transportation and to plan and book journeys. While these platforms can contribute to making urban travel more sustainable and efficient, they can also lead to governance challenges and have negative external effects, raising questions about how public values can best be safeguarded. In this article, public values are defined as normative concepts that describe both the impact on and democratic control of an affected public. This article aims to initiate a more structured discussion about platform urbanism, specifically how and to what extent public values are incorporated in platform design and operation in the realm of mobility. It introduces an assessment framework for mobility platforms that was developed as part of a transdisciplinary research project in the Netherlands. This framework is grounded in two academic debates regarding 1) the rise of platform urbanism and 2) new forms of mobility that accompany the densification of cities. The paper refers to the mobility pilots Kutsuplus, UbiGo and Whim to illustrate how the safeguarding of public values can be evaluated. In the concluding section, the paper discusses some ways in which the assessment framework can be used for future research, for instance through scenarios.

Climate change is one of the most challenging environmental and social problems for contemporary urban planning. In response to this phenomenon, city networks have emerged as new configurations of urban climate governance that encourage the implementation of experiments such as testing new solutions regarding sustainable transport. While city networks are gaining momentum and influence as effective platforms to transform and scale up pilot experiments into city-wide schemes, little is known regarding their role in conditioning and leveraging such urban experiments Our paper investigates the underexplored nature of urban experiments within city networks and provides a better understanding of how these networks condition urban experiments. To this end an analytical model has been developed and applied to the case of the C40 Climate Leadership Group (C40) and its Climate Positive Development Good Practice Guide. Our findings suggest that the C40 encourages variation in local climate experiments and the generation of new and innovative climate solutions in member cities. In particular they reveal that the implementation of climate positive experiments has passed the ‘variation’ stage, is currently in the ‘selection’ stage, and likely to move towards the ‘retention’ stage in the near future. Potential experimentation outputs of the case are identified as built environment change, new citizen practices, policy change, infrastructural change and new technology. Noticeably, we consider that the C40 plays an important role in providing fundamental institutional support to implement and leverage climate projects within its member cities.

Climate-driven changes in coastal flood risk have enormous consequences for coastal cities. These risks intersect with unequal patterns of environmental hazards exacerbating differential vulnerability of climate related flooding. Here we analyze differential vulnerability of coastal flooding in New York City, USA, as an environmental justice issue caused by shifts in flood risk due to increasing floodplain extents. These extents are represented by updates to the 100-year floodplain by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and urban changes in land use, land value, and socio-economic characteristics of flood exposed populations. We focus on six local community districts containing disproportionately vulnerable communities. Across our study areas, we observed increases in the floodplain’s extent by 45.7%, total exposed population by 10.5%, and population living in vulnerable communities by 7.5%. Overall flood risk increases regardless of increases in the updated floodplain extent, as do floodplain property values. However, variability is high between community districts; in some cases, increases in exposure coincide with decreases in vulnerability due to shifts in racial demographics and increases in income (i.e. potential floodplain gentrification), while others experienced increases in exposure and vulnerability (i.e. double jeopardy). These findings highlight that the dominant drivers of coastal flood risk in NYC are ongoing real estate development and continued increases in sea level rise and storm severity, both of which have explicit implications for flood vulnerability. We describe the social processes governing development in the flood zone, namely zoning, resilience planning, and the determination of potential flooding severity and related insurance rates. We also discuss how these social drivers of risk intersect with social dimensions of vulnerability due to racist housing markets, and the distributions of public housing and toxic chemical hazards. We conclude with a framework for the analysis of contextual and outcome-based vulnerability to coastal flood hazards, and provide policy recommendations to reduce risks over the medium to long term.

Urban transformation towards sustainability requires deep systemic change in economic, social, environmental, cultural, organisational, governmental, and physical terms. Considering this challenge, this paper aims to explore the potentials and limitations of urban planning to incorporate an urban transition management approach that strives to enable such deep transformation processes.Taking the Integrated Sustainable Urban Development (ISUD) Strategy for district regeneration in Valencia (Spain) as a case study, the analysis and discussion elaborate on the main barriers and enablers for urban planning to incorporate a transition perspective when tackling urban sustainability challenges. Four main fields of tension emerge as particularly relevant: 1) Democratic representation versus involvement of forerunner innovators, 2) Formal decision-making procedures versus reflexivity and social learning, 3) Standardised project formats versus open processes of searching and experimentation, and 4) Fragmented policy agendas and budget lines versus integrated and multi-sectoral interventions.The case study illustrates how urban planning struggles to align its rationale with requirements for managing complex sustainability transformations. The findings point to a paradox inherent in planning for transformation: although urban planning necessarily incorporates the values and rules of the currently dominant urban systems, it also has the potential to create windows of opportunity for niche innovations to emerge at district or even city level. Therefore, urban planning processes form an arena in which conflicts between niches and regimes are negotiated.

As widely attested in the literature, the evaluation of co-production is complex and unsuited to the use of conventional quality, monitoring and evaluation indicators. This reflects the uncertainties, co-contributory factors and time lags involved, particularly when seeking to assess institutional and wider societal effects of multi-stakeholder participatory processes and deliberative fora. The most widely assessed effects include the immediate outputs and outcomes of a project or activity (so-called first order effects) while wider societal or third order effects continue to be the most difficult to capture and, consequently, are the least well studied. Because of this difficulty, the intermediate, second order effects of organisational transformation and policy implementation constitute a growing challenge for evaluation. This is our focus here. After 10 years of transdisciplinary co-productive research practice, Mistra Urban Futures, as an interstitial research space bridging academia and practice working through city-based institutional partnerships called platforms, has reached a phase where some of these effects are becoming distinguishable. Accordingly, we discuss the prerequisites for co-production practitioners, including policy makers, to engage their respective organisations in transitional and incremental experimentation in order to achieve relevant institutional changes. This requires enabling infrastructures that support training, facilitation and the creation of ‘safe’ spaces to promote trust and legitimacy. These are needed to underpin the long-lasting personal and organisational commitments which are crucial to achieve transformative organisational effects.

Amplifying the impact of sustainability initiatives to foster transformations in urban and rural contexts, has received increasing attention in resilience, social innovation, and sustainability transitions research. We review the literature on amplification frameworks and propose an integrative typology of eight processes, which aim to increase the impact of such initiatives. The eight amplification processes are: stabilizing, speeding up, growing, replicating, transferring, spreading, scaling up, and scaling deep. We aggregated these processes into three categories: amplifying within, amplifying out, and amplifying beyond. This integrative typology aims to stimulate the debate on impact amplification from urban and rural sustainability initiatives across research areas to support sustainability transformations. We propose going beyond an understanding of amplification, which focuses only on the increase of numbers of sustainability initiatives, by considering how these initiatives create transformative change.