ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a panoramic on the Living Labs phenomenon, mapping its current configurations in relation to the transformation of urban space. It discusses ethical hacking and Living Labs, citizen science and crowdsourcing, and the explicit policy goal of creating smart districts and ‘cool’ places with a rising tag on private rents. The Living Labs concept is generally intended as a bottom-up approach to the ‘smart city’, designed to increase citizens’ participation and involvement in ‘solving’ local issues. The promoters and critics of Living Labs highlight three important characteristics that enable such a vision for the ‘smart city’. Most pop-up projects involve social media platforms as an interface between participant stakeholders, technology, and places. They work well with the spatio-temporal dimension of digital interactions, which involves fast, transitory, and sometimes ephemeral connections. University-led Living Labs are a model of partnership with government and industry that is currently “blossoming”.
