The ULALABS project lays the foundations for the implementation of a European distributed Living Lab

The ULALABS project, funded by the European Union's Erasmus+ programme and led by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), aims to create a European distributed living lab focused on urban challenges and climate change through open innovation and collaboration between European universities.

The webinar ‘The Emerging Lab of Labs - Activities, Experiences, and Outcomes of the First Year of the Project’ served to present the main milestones achieved during the first year of the project. The seminar, which brought together experts and professionals from academia, the research sector, business and public administration from more than 10 European countries, began with a speech by ECIU University Director Niall Power, who highlighted how ULALABS aligns with ECIU's vision of creating spaces for co-creation to solve social and economic challenges that require multidisciplinary approaches. “Moving beyond traditional learning models through innovative combinations of education, research, innovation and service to our society is essential to shaping a resilient and more sustainable future," he stressed.

Afterwards, representatives from the different universities involved in the project shared case studies on different urban experimentation spaces, identifying good practices and their impact on sustainable innovation. Among them were Konstantinos Kourkoutas, coordinator of the Smart Cities CORE at UAB and coordinator of ULALABS, Tina-Simone Neset from Linköping University, Fabio Hernández Palacio and Anders Riel Müller from the University of Stavanger and Ana Mafalda from the University of Twente.

The speakers shared promising practices, structures and experiences from different urban experimentation spaces, as well as their role in accelerating sustainable innovation and their function as collaborative learning spaces. From Spain, for example, the cases of UAB Living Campus, UAB Open Labs, Mollet Lab and Valencia Urban Sandbox were presented.

All of these initiatives are included in their recently published publication, which analyses 12 case studies from across Europe and explores how these spaces foster collaborative experimentation and the development of more sustainable urban policies.

During the seminar, results were also presented on the future vision of the Distributed Living Lab (Lab of Labs) that ULALABS wants to create. The aim is to articulate the diverse urban experimentation spaces emerging in the different ECIU partner regions into a distributed Living Lab which is centred around a vibrant learning community, focusing on sustainable urban transformations; such a “meta-lab” can tackle in a coordinated manner shared challenges within the ECIU ecosystem reinforcing the r+d+I infrastructures and capacities of the ECIU university and augmenting its overall impact.