International Symposium on Urban Living Labs

Urban Living Labs, also known as Urban Collaboratories, provide an environment for researchers and users to co-create learning, innovation, sustainable behaviours and resilient agency through real-world urban observation, research and full scale experimentation. 

This symposium will bring together urban living labs from around the world to share practical and scientific experiences, and build an international network of urban living labs and their teams.

Dates

Conference: 25-26 February 2016
Registration deadline: 16 February 2016

Book

Book your place for the symposium via the Newcastle University webstore.

Each team representing an existing or planned urban living lab is invited to give a 5-minute elevator pitch to provide a very quick introduction.

Poster boards will be provided to showcase living labs; you are encouraged to bring posters for display. Please email SAgE.ScienceCentral@newcastle.ac.uk to ensure you are timetabled to talk and allocated poster space.

Themes

The symposium will explore a number of interlinked questions clustered around a number of themes:

Frameworks for Urban Living Laboratories:
What are the common constituent components of an urban living lab? What aspects are transferable? Can we build a network to share knowledge and experience?

Data and observation:
How do we handle and process huge urban datasets? How do we design observation and sensor deployment strategies? What technologies exist to enable this?

Experimentation and demonstrators:
How do we operate our city as a laboratory? What does full scale experimentation looks like? How can we ensure it is as scientific as possible?

Analytics and modelling:
What new capabilities do urban living labs need, or enable? How do we better understand the complex human-natural-physical interactions within urban areas?

Communities of practise and learning:
How can urban living labs unlock innovation? How do they help co-design research? How do we embed learning from the living lab into communities and research?

For further details please see the 2-day programme.

Venue

The symposium will be hosted at Newcastle University in the Research Beehive, with dinner be held at St James’ Park. For more details, see the transport and directions page.

Research Beehive