Erratum: Human Smart Cities

Abstract

This chapter explores some of the most significant potentials of Living Lab environments in urban systems while viewing urban planning as the entire set of transformative practices possible and available in urban contexts. It explores three main potentials of Urban Living Labs, i.e., their being practice-based innovation environments, their capacity to create cross-boundary arenas where many diverse actors and organizations can interact, and, lastly, their being contexts for new modes of urban activism. This chapter also analyzes some challenges launched by Living Labs in urban environments and discusses some possible roles for planners who recognize Living Lab potentials as transformative drivers. Finally, considering the collective (public) experimental perspective introduced by Urban Living Labs, the idea of the city as a laboratory is discussed. The term " Living Lab " refers to a conceptual research and development approach developed in computer science at the end of the 1990s. The concept of Living Lab originates from William Mitchell (MIT Media Lab) and was promptly adopted in human-computer interaction focused on user-centered design principles. It easily evolved to a more radical and human-driven approach to design and to participatory design in particular. The concept has been adopted very rapidly in many sectors moving from product development to service design, so it became the key concept in many smart city initiatives and projects as well. There are many definitions for what a Living Lab is. Svensson et al. (2010) and Molinari (2011) consider a Living Lab to be a methodology, as well as an organi-zation, an environment, and/or a system. Eriksson et al. (2005) describe a Living Lab as " a user-centric research methodology for sensing, prototyping, validating and refining complex solutions in multiple and evolving real life contexts. " Another G. Concilio ()