WHAT'S NEW
Webinar: Living Labs, a Way of Governing the City
Examples from Eindhoven
As part of the ROCK project, EUROCITIES and Julie’s Bicycle organised a webinar on “living labs, a way of governing the city”. Living Labs aim to develop new products or processes in order to find solutions to problems, but also to test and implement pre-developed solutions in a co-creation manner and in a real-life context.
Living Labs in Eindhoven are an integral part of the city’s strategy that is developed, supported and implemented at political and administrative level. It fits in Eindhoven's line of thinking and working, in which technological innovation are combined with collaborative forms of working, citizen engagement and citizen centred developments.
This approach is materialized in various places in the city where the municipality took the initiative to develop living lab initiatives in collaboration with actors from other sectors (private sector institutions, public organizations, academic and knowledge institutions). Three local examples were presented during the webinar:
- NRE-area (NRE-terrein) is situated very near the downtown area on one side, and next to a residential area on the other side. This used to be the place where the gas-supply factories of Eindhoven were located. The city council set out market-research for future residents and started a collaborative development process of the area.
- The abandoned area of the Philips factory needed a largescale planning and regeneration strategy. Strijp-S is now a creative and cultural area of Eindhoven, focused on the living laboratory where creative persons, business and education work together intensively on innovative products and projects, in which new materials are tested.
- Stratumseind is the longest pub street in the Netherlands. The Stratumseid Living Lab studies the utilisation of interactive lighting design to improve safety perception, by examining psychological pathways through which exposure to dynamic lighting might defuse escalating behaviour.
You can now listen to the webinar here:
