Urban Labs as Innovation Infrastructure for Sustainable Urban Development

Cities are engines of innovation and job creation, but they also present complex, ever-evolving problems, that often challenge existing approaches. As a response, urban experiments are often used as a method in a broader trend in public policy innovation, to align urban planning and design with strategic and complex problem-solving, all while developing platforms for societal transformation through the active involvement of local stakeholders in these experiments.

As such, Cities, Academia, and National Governments are championing urban experiments to address societal, spatial, and environmental challenges embedded in increased urban complexity, through different models of Urban Labs, intended as a tool that can help address these challenges in an inter-related manner, by scoping and piloting innovative approaches for tackling them at different levels, from project implementation to policy making.
Through UN-Habitat’s support, the Saudi Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs and Housing (MoMRAH) has recently undertaken the effort of setting up a National Urban Lab aimed at spearheading innovation for the implementation of the Kingdom Vision 2030.
In parallel, UN-Habitat has established a Global Network of Urban Planning and Design Labs as an initiative to support local and national governments in achieving sustainable urban development, by bringing together local and international expertise to work on concrete projects to experiment locally on how to best contextualize and generate appropriate responses to both local and global urban challenges.
Although the labeling, specific mandate, and scale/focus of interventions might differ, the approach is shared across a wide variety of institutions, as the examples of Barcelona Regional in Spain, the Academia-bound Global Urban Lab and its Centre for the Just City in The Netherlands, and the URBANICE Centre of Excellence in Malaysia testify.
Each model contributed differently to the SDGs localization, for example, TU-Delft, with its Centre for the Just City. has developed a Spatial Justice Framework for Policy Design and Evaluation (2022) that was then adopted by the Horizon project UP2030, its 12 European Partner Cities, and 45 technical partners, while URBANICE Malaysia, which is set up as a Company Limited By-Guarantee (CLBG) under the Ministry of Housing & Local Government, has actively advocated the SDGs localization through both research and practice.
MoMRAH is keen to showcase its model and approach, comparing it with and learning from other experiences of Urban Labs’ creation and management across the world. Hence, this event targets national and local government officials, legislators, academia, and civil society organizations interested in replicating these experiments, learning from others’ approaches, and joining an expanding network of Urban Labs across the world.