Urban Transition Labs: co-creating transformative action for sustainable cities

In a general mindset of ‘local elaboration’ of sustainable development, cities are logical loci for action: they do not only concentrate (future) consumption and production – and are hence at the origin of unsustainability ‘symptoms’-, they simultaneously are the operational units in which concrete actions can be envisaged, designed, (politically) facilitated and effectively rolled out. Whenever cities engage in this innovative, ambitious and responsible task of change for integrated sustainability, an undoubtedly major amount of learning emerges; and vice versa, sound knowledge/best practices on how to proceed with local sustainability oriented change processes could be a firm support for local actors in their quest for effective and efficient action. In this paper, we present ‘Urban Transition Labs’ (UTL) as settings in which real life trajectories of sustainable development in cities are deployed and at the same time carefully observed; in a co-creative collaboration between actors and researchers (transdisciplinary research). Thereby, a transition management approach is applied, resulting in a cycle of five distinct phases: (a) process design and system analysis, (b) problem structuring and envisioning, (c) back casting, determining major pathways and agenda setting, (d) experimenting and (e) monitoring and evaluation. The process is guided by a ‘Transition-team’ that co-designs the process and feeds in relevant information to the city transition ‘arenas’. These arenas are the actual initial incubators of change; they are crewed by local frontrunners that are considered as engaged visionary people with diverse backgrounds. The findings of arenas feed a further participatory process to engage the relevant city stakeholders into action. In this paper, we want to present the UTL as a potentially valuable concept to support a ‘walking-the-talk’ of sustainable development by cities; and we share the first impressions on specific barriers and enablers that could determine the effectiveness of the envisaged approach.