Living Labs: A Creative and Collaborative Planning Approach

Therefore, high expectations are placed on the role of planning in addressing them. However, such complex challenges cannot be easily solved with the traditional, sectoral planning approaches, or by planners and decision-makers alone; they require a cross-sectoral and societal-inclusive understanding and collaboration of various kinds of stakeholders.

Consequently, in the search for new approaches and tools that favour experimentation, flexibility, and collaboration, planners and decision-makers are turning their attention towards the private sector, where Living Labs have been extensively used in open and user-oriented innovation. Despite the growing number of studies that picture them as a ‘magic recipe’ for experimentation and development of creative solutions for ‘wicked problems’, Living Labs have only recently started gaining attention in the spatial domain.