TY - JOUR T1 - The Defining Characteristics of Urban Living Labs JF - Technology Innovation Management Review Y1 - 2017 A1 - Kris Steen A1 - Ellen van Bueren KW - characteristics KW - cities KW - definition KW - living labs KW - TIM Review KW - urban living labs AB - The organization of supported and sustainable urban interventions is challenging, with multiple actors involved, fragmented decision-making powers, and multiple values at stake. Globally, urban living labs have become a fashionable phenomenon to tackle this challenge, fostering the development and implementation of innovation, experimentation, and knowledge in urban, real-life settings while emphasizing the important role of participation and co-creation. However, although urban living labs could in this way help cities to speed up the sustainable transition, urban living lab experts agree that, in order to truly succeed in these ambitious tasks, the way urban living labs are being shaped and steered needs further research. Yet, they also confirm the existing variation and opaqueness in the definition of the concept. This article contributes to conceptual clarity by developing an operationalized definition of urban living labs, which has been used to assess 90 sustainable urban innovation projects in the city of Amsterdam. The assessment shows that the majority of the projects that are labelled as living labs do not include one or more of the defining elements of a living lab. In particular, the defining co-creation and development activities were found to be absent in many of the projects. This article makes it possible to categorize alleged living lab projects and distill the “true” living labs from the many improperly labelled or unlabelled living labs, allowing more specific analyses and, ultimately, better targeted methodological recommendations for urban living labs. PB - Talent First Network CY - Ottawa VL - 7 UR - http://timreview.ca/article/1088 IS - 7 U1 - Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions Kris Steen is a Research Fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions and the Chair of Urban Development Management at the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, where her academic work focuses on the design of concepts and strategies that produce and promote an urban environment that meets the demands of sustainability, such as “urban living labs”. In 2016, she graduated Cum Laude in Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences at the Delft University of Technology. U2 - Delft University of Technology Ellen van Bueren is Professor of Urban Development Management at the Delft University of Technology, Principal Investigator at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, and board member of the Leiden-Delft Erasmus Centre of Sustainability in the Netherlands. Her research and teaching focuses on the development of tangible concepts, tools, and principles for an integrated, area-centred approach to contemporary urban challenges. She is the author of scientific publications and a member of the editorial board of scientific journals in the field of policy management and urban development, and she teaches in various (inter)disciplinary educational settings for students and professionals. ER -