IKED - Open Living Lab Agenda

Activities

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..:: Open Living Lab Agenda

In several activities, work is ongoing to advance the practice and usability of the “Open Living Lab Agenda”. This is particularly the case in URBiNAT, where the link between living labs, which are relatively concentrated in space, and more far-reaching "Communities of Practice", is explored. Several experiments are undertaken as part of this agenda. In Thessaloniki, 3-5 September, 2019, the URBiNAT Consortium partners Americo Mateus (GUDA – Lisbon), Nathalie Nunes (CES – Coimbra), Ingrid Andersson (IKED – Malmö), and Knud Erik Hilding-Harmann (DTI – Copenhagen) were invited to conduct a workshop during the Open Living Lab days organised by ENOLL, the European Network of Open Living Labs to conduct a workshop . The URBiNAT team took this opportunity to establish the foundations for building a sustainable community of practice on citizens participation in sustainable development. Prior to the workshop, analysis was carried out on all European living labs for the purpose of identifying and clustering common key words. It resulted in four clusters of key words that we introduced as "work in progress" within the workshop. We also mapped out the list of factors that URBiNAT has identified as key to achieving successful citizens participation.

At the workshop, novel approaches were presented and discussed, in regard to citizens’ participative processes, using "Mentimeter" to engage with 40 participants. In particular, participants were asked to identify which factors are most important in each cluster. Participants then contributed based on their own experience with their chosen cluster group, and each group produced a statement to be further developed in subsequent webinars. The latter have been held on October 29th, 2019, on the 21st of January, 2020, on May 7th, 2020. The following topics were further developed in this process:

Plunge (have guts) – risk as a means to achieve the cutting edge.
How can we inspire a new meaning of life? – How do we create togetherness being authentic, transparent, inclusive, working on a shared agenda and common vision?
We need to go local to be able to scale up. But how can we do so sustainably? (Key word seeding/obvious change)

Continued capacity-building around the open living lab agenda, with linkages to "communities of practice", is ongoing with the lead cities of URBiNAT, i.e. Porto, Nantes and Sofia. Special events , as in Siena on October 31 - November 1-3rd in Siena, Italy, and as planned in Copenhagen on May 9-11, 2022, contribute with further experience and help diffuse use of the methodology in support of Nature-based Solutions. As a special track leading on from the Muscat event, a series of Youth Workshops, thus far undertaken in Germany, Italy, Iran and South Africa, in addition to Oman, are opening up for engagement of children in issues of water management in the past, today, and in the future. The response to these workshops, by the 300 children or so who have taken part to date, and also all else involved, has been overwhelmingly positive and generated important lessons for scaling such programmes ahead.

Photos from Youth Workshop on the Value of Water, National Museum of the Sultanate of Oman, November 13, 2019

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