Cities do not transform through project plans and strategies alone. They transform through practice, through the slow, iterative, sometimes frustrating work of collaboratively trying things out in the real world, learning from what happens, sharing outcomes, and adjusting accordingly. That is the work done in Urban Living Labs, reflected across several programs during the AMS Scientific Conference 2026.
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The question that kept resurfacing, in different forms: how do we ensure that what happens in a Living Lab matters to the city? Not just within the experiment’s boundaries, but in the systems, institutions and communities that surround it? The AMS Urban Living Lab Way of Working helps structure this in eight key activities to guide the process, clustered into four interconnected phases. Each phase builds on the last, from a shared mission to measuring its broader impact on the city. Here is what the conference taught us about this.
1. Getting partners and purpose in place
Every Urban Living Lab starts with two deceptively simple questions: what are we trying to change, and how are we going to work together? These questions lay the relational and organizational foundation on which everything else depends. A shared mission gives experiments direction. A concrete plan turns good intentions into clear roles and resources. And because cities and partnerships evolve, both need to be revisited regularly. Getting this phase right is what makes a lab resilient when things get complicated.
The panel talk on connecting innovation to city-wide change made clear that a shared mission is not a one-time agreement; it is continuously earned. Ewout Runhaar (City of Amsterdam) argued that personal trust is not sufficient: the system itself must become trustworthy, through transparency, shared data, and the willingness to acknowledge mistakes openly. Roos Dors (Women on Food) added that a genuine grassroots connection is not optional. Institutions must hear the people affected by their decisions, not merely consult them. Building the Slavery Museum, she noted, required earning real trust with Surinamese and Antillean communities over time, through humility and sustained relationships, not a form or a process.
Photo: Maarten Nauw
“Talk and listen to people. Connect grassroots with institutions. Together, with respect, as part of the system. We are the system.”
Roos Dors, Women on Food
Urban Living Labs are built on co-creation, but in practice, the people who show up are rarely a cross-section of the community. Participants who are involved from the start tend to be motivated, sustainability-oriented residents: valuable for their energy and local knowledge, but not typical of the people a Living Lab ultimately needs to serve. As a lab grows, its solutions must work for people who were never in the room.
The AMS Urban Impact Team addressed this and raised questions like: how do you broaden participation without losing the depth that early co-creation enables? And what happens when a project's basic direction is already set before the harder-to-reach majority has had any say? Answering these questions takes more than better outreach; it requires a genuine understanding of why many residents don't engage and what it would take for them to do so. To explore this, participants of Urban Living Labs used participatory theatre: stepping into the shoes of disengaged residents and asking, from the inside, what would make them want to be part of this.
The FlexECs project - exploring how electric mobility and local energy communities can reduce grid congestion - showed that the technical dimensions of an urban experiment are often the easier part. The harder challenge is designing for inclusive participation from the outset.
Photo: Maarten Nauw
“If you want a spatially equitable infrastructure, you need to think beyond the charging station itself - into scenarios that allow people who may never own an electric vehicle to also participate in the energy transition.”
Moses Katontoka, PhD candidate, Wageningen University & Research
2. Learning from real-world experiments
This is the phase where the Living Lab comes alive. Designing experiments and learning from them is at the core of the Urban Living Lab, but only if the experiments are set up to generate insight, not just deliver a result. That means asking questions before you start: what do we want to learn? It means staying present in the field as things unfold, adapting when reality surprises you. And it means being honest about what works, what didn't, which lessons belong only to this place, and which can be implemented elsewhere.
Professor James Evans offered a sharp reframing of what learning means in a Living Lab: the labs are not primarily about the pilots; they are about what organizations learn as they run them. Drawing on a decade of EU smart cities work, and in line with what Dutch scholars working on Living Labs have already established (see, for example, Metze 2023; Vreugdenhil et al. 2018), Evans discussed the pilot paradox: successful experiments don’t automatically translate into systemic transformation. Replication fails not because technology doesn't work, but because structural and cultural contexts differ too much between cities. For example, Manchester spent six years trying to install four floating bus stops that are standard across Northern Europe. The real missed opportunity, Evans argued, is organizational learning. His example: the biobus was successfully replicated in Stavanger, not through policy transfer, but by flying mechanics from Leipzig to meet their Stavanger counterparts in person. The knowledge that mattered couldn't be written into a report; it had to travel from person to person. This is well described by AMS’ researchers Ersoy & Van Bueren in their article on Triple loop learning (2020).
Photo: Maarten Nauw
“It is madness to develop useful knowledge continually and not exploit it. That is the challenge behind EU projects; the agency given to municipalities.”
James Evans, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Manchester
3. Turning local insights into wider knowledge and practice
An experiment that only informs itself is a missed opportunity. This phase is about making sure that what you learn in the field doesn't stay there. That requires two distinct moves: first, connecting the dots between your findings and the broader vision your lab is working on, and, if possible, actively sharing what you've learned with others who can use it.
This is at the heart of the Living Lab Crash Course from AMS Institute: learnings from experiments must feed back into the lab and translate into wider knowledge. Professor Tamara Metze offered a sharp reframing: she proposed dropping the word ‘scaling’ altogether, given its economic connotations. Replace it, she suggested, with ‘spreading, deepening, and radicalizing innovation’. The goal is not to replicate a model everywhere; it is to shift the mindset that produces models in the first place. Her EXTRA project reinforces this, building evidence on when Living Labs succeed in influencing the systems around them. Its central finding: experiments are most powerful when policy change is an explicit goal from the start, not a hoped-for side effect.
The ATELIER project drew on experience implementing Positive Energy Districts across multiple European cities. Participants consistently found that governance structures and regulatory conditions matter just as much as the technical solution, and that these are far harder to transfer. A solar panel can be installed anywhere. The collaborative governance that makes a Positive Energy District work is far more locally specific. And Energy Lab Zuidoost put the experiment-to-policy tension at the center. Policy can play a genuinely enabling role: by creating regulatory free zones that allow experiments to happen without being blocked by rules designed for a different world, by connecting labs. Hence, their findings reinforce one another by establishing formal mechanisms for incorporating experimental learning into policy.
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Photo: Maarten Nauw
4. Measuring impact on the wider city over time
This phase asks the hardest question of all: are we actually changing the system? Living Lab practitioners, researchers, and policymakers are working together to validate a set of impact indicators and a visual dashboard (developed by AMS Institute, WUR, and Toekomstbestendige Leefomgeving) to capture the social, environmental, economic, and innovation performance of Living Labs. An international panel from Glasgow, Amsterdam, and Barcelona introduced Social Return on Investment (SROI) as a framework for the next generation of public-private partnerships: systemic impact must be made legible to funders, policymakers, and the communities a Living Lab seeks to serve.
But it means more than tracking outputs. Professor James Evans coined a broader challenge: the capacity for urban transformation is distributed across networks of people, organizations, and places. Monitoring impact means tracking whether those connections are deepening, and whether the conditions for lasting change are being built.
And doing this continuously - not as a final evaluation, but as an ongoing compass - is what keeps a Living Lab resilient enough to reach the transformation it sets out to make.
From Conference to Practice
The Urban Living Lab community continues to build on the discussions and insights shared during the AMS Scientific Conference. Together with a group of Urban Living Lab experts, coordinators, and innovation practitioners, we are developing a practical Urban Living Lab Toolbox that translates the Urban Living Lab Way of Working into actionable tools, methods, and templates for real-world innovation projects. Over the coming months, these tools will be further selected, tested, and refined with practitioners to ensure they address common challenges in coordinating and facilitating Urban Living Labs. We are also exploring opportunities for a co-creation workshop after the summer.
Interested in following the initiative or potentially joining future activities? Feel free to contact us at tbl.livinglabs@ams-institute.org.
