Books by Thomas Hoeflehner
These guidelines are intended for team members and managers of urban labs and, more generally, fo... more These guidelines are intended for team members and managers of urban labs and, more generally, for civil servants and facilitators in cities working with experimental processes to tackle complex challenges. They aim to support the everyday practice of collaboratively experimenting and learning how to create more sustainable and inclusive cities.
Policy-makers and urban development stakeholders may struggle to implement urban labs, and seek guidance for further development. Evidence-based guidelines and design principles are needed to decide for which types of challenges urban labs are most suited, how urban labs can best be organized in terms of structure, process and participation, and how urban labs can best be integrated into local government structures.
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Articles by Thomas Hoeflehner
Urban labs have gained popularity throughout Europe. They area manifestation of the search for ne... more Urban labs have gained popularity throughout Europe. They area manifestation of the search for new forms of urban governance capable of addressing the complex problems that cities are facing nowadays. These labs typically aim to create space for trans- disciplinary research, co-creation and experimenting with potential solutions to sustainability challenges. In urban labs in four European cities, we applied a specific transdisciplinary action research approach labelled as “transitioning of (urban lab) experiments”. Our approach consists of four steps: co-design of experiments, setting explicit learning goals, evaluating what has been learned, and dissemination and embedding of lessons learned. Critically reflecting on the difficulties encountered in the implementation of the transitioning approach, we conclude that it must be adapted when applied to urban labs focusing on sustainability transitions in institutional and governance systems rather than in socio-technical systems. We provide recommen- dations as to how the approach could be adapted.
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Papers by Thomas Hoeflehner
Sustainability
Climate change causes global effects on multiple levels. The anthropogenic input of greenhouse ga... more Climate change causes global effects on multiple levels. The anthropogenic input of greenhouse gases increases the atmospheric mean temperature. It furthermore leads to a higher probability of extreme weather events (e.g., heat waves, floods) and thus strongly impacts the habitats of humans, animals, and plants. Against this background, research and innovation activities are increasingly focusing on potential health-related aspects and feasible adaptation and mitigation strategies. Progressing urbanization and demographic change paired with the climate change-induced heat island effect exposes humans living in urban habitats to increasing health risks. By employing scientometric methods, this scoping study provides a systematic bird’s eye view on the epistemic landscapes of climate change, its health-related effects, and possible technological and nature-based interventions and strategies in order to make urban areas climate proof. Based on a literature corpus consisting of 2614 res...
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Sustainability, 2022
Climate change causes global effects on multiple levels. The anthropogenic input of greenhouse ga... more Climate change causes global effects on multiple levels. The anthropogenic input of greenhouse gases increases the atmospheric mean temperature. It furthermore leads to a higher probability of extreme weather events (e.g., heat waves, floods) and thus strongly impacts the habitats of humans, animals, and plants. Against this background, research and innovation activities are increasingly focusing on potential health-related aspects and feasible adaptation and mitigation strategies. Progressing urbanization and demographic change paired with the climate change-induced heat island effect exposes humans living in urban habitats to increasing health risks. By employing scientometric methods, this scoping study provides a systematic bird’s eye view on the epistemic landscapes of climate change, its health-related effects, and possible technological and nature-based interventions and strategies in order to make urban areas climate proof. Based on a literature corpus consisting of 2614 research articles collected in SCOPUS, we applied network-based analysis and visualization techniques to map the different scientific communities, discourses and their interrelations. From a public health perspective, the results demonstrate the range of either direct or indirect health effects of climate change. Furthermore, the results indicate that a public health-related scientific discourse is converging with an urban planning and building science driven discourse oriented towards urban blue and green infrastructure. We conclude that this development might mirror the socio-political demand to tackle emerging climate change-induced challenges by transgressing disciplinary boundaries.
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The 'Smart City Living Lab' is an emerging approach in European cities, referred to proje... more The 'Smart City Living Lab' is an emerging approach in European cities, referred to projects devised to design, test and learn from innovative socio-technical practices (i.e. 'new ways of doing something') in real-time and in urban contexts, with a diversity of stakeholders. However, successful implementation of new practices in the reality of LLs does not guarantee the large-scale adoption required to reach their full effect in resource efficiency. Also, there is a risk of exclusion of social groups not matching the required 'smart citizen' profile. Acknowledging such drawbacks, we focused on how to foster upscaling and avoid social exclusion, developing a novel approach that anticipates such problems, and testing it through 'smarter' LL experiments addressing mobility-related topics in four European cities. In this paper we summarize the key constraints we have identified and comment on the strategies we implemented in our Living Lab activities in o...
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Sustainability, 2021
Against the backdrop of multiple ongoing crises in European cities related to socio-spatial injus... more Against the backdrop of multiple ongoing crises in European cities related to socio-spatial injustice, inequality and exclusion, we argue for a smart right to the city. There is an urgent need for a thorough account of the entrepreneurial mode of technocapitalist smart urbanism. While much of both affirmative and critical research on Smart City developments equate or even reduce smartness to digital infrastructures, we put actual smartness—in the sense of social justice and sustainability—at centre stage. This paper builds on a fundamental structural critique of (1) the entrepreneurial city (Harvey) and (2) the capitalist city (Lefebvre). Drawing upon Lefebvre’s right to the city as a normative framework, we use Smart City developments in the city of Graz as an illustration of our argument. Considering strategies of waste and mobility management, we reflect on how they operate as spatial and technical fixes—fixing the limits of capitalism’s growth. By serving specific corporate inte...
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Open Living Lab Days 2018 Research and Innovation Conference Proceedings 2018, 2018
The ‘Smart City Living Lab’ is an emerging approach in European cities, referred to projects devi... more The ‘Smart City Living Lab’ is an emerging approach in European cities, referred to projects devised to design, test and learn from innovative socio-technical practices (i.e. ‘new ways of doing something’) in real-time and in urban contexts, with a diversity of stakeholders. However, successful implementation of new practices in the reality of LLs does not guarantee the large-scale adoption required to reach their full effect in resource efficiency. Also, there is a risk of exclusion of social groups not matching the required ‘smart citizen’ profile. Acknowledging such drawbacks, we focused on how to foster upscaling and avoid social exclusion, developing a novel approach that anticipates such problems, and testing it through ‘smarter’ LL experiments addressing mobility-related topics in four European cities. In this paper we summarize the key constraints we have identified and comment on the strategies we implemented in our Living Lab activities in order to cope with them.
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These guidelines are intended for team members and managers of urban labs and, more generally, fo... more These guidelines are intended for team members and managers of urban labs and, more generally, for civil servants and facilitators in cities working with experimental processes to tackle complex ch ...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Sustainability
Against the backdrop of multiple ongoing crises in European cities related to socio-spatial injus... more Against the backdrop of multiple ongoing crises in European cities related to socio-spatial injustice, inequality and exclusion, we argue for a smart right to the city. There is an urgent need for a thorough account of the entrepreneurial mode of technocapitalist smart urbanism. While much of both affirmative and critical research on Smart City developments equate or even reduce smartness to digital infrastructures, we put actual smartness—in the sense of social justice and sustainability—at centre stage. This paper builds on a fundamental structural critique of (1) the entrepreneurial city (Harvey) and (2) the capitalist city (Lefebvre). Drawing upon Lefebvre’s right to the city as a normative framework, we use Smart City developments in the city of Graz as an illustration of our argument. Considering strategies of waste and mobility management, we reflect on how they operate as spatial and technical fixes—fixing the limits of capitalism’s growth. By serving specific corporate inte...
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GAIA - Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society
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Books by Thomas Hoeflehner
Policy-makers and urban development stakeholders may struggle to implement urban labs, and seek guidance for further development. Evidence-based guidelines and design principles are needed to decide for which types of challenges urban labs are most suited, how urban labs can best be organized in terms of structure, process and participation, and how urban labs can best be integrated into local government structures.
Articles by Thomas Hoeflehner
Papers by Thomas Hoeflehner
Policy-makers and urban development stakeholders may struggle to implement urban labs, and seek guidance for further development. Evidence-based guidelines and design principles are needed to decide for which types of challenges urban labs are most suited, how urban labs can best be organized in terms of structure, process and participation, and how urban labs can best be integrated into local government structures.