The city as lab for own improvement

De Stad als lab voor eigen verbetering. Interesting article related to the work that Living Lab in Genk is doing: http://www.platform31.nl/nieuws/de-stad-als-lab-voor-eigen-verbetering

What determines economic and social resilience of regions, and what are the opportunities for renewed growth and innovation in urban European regions? There has been a lively discussion on regional resilience after the crisis, but this article adds a couple of points that are currently under-addressed in the overal resilience debate. How can these points be (further) addressed and explored? I’m especially interested in any further ideas or interesting examples when it comes to location based or serious games.

The points mentioned in this article:

1. The role that policy, institutions and instruments can play.

2. The importance of the human scale. Who are the more resilient actors in a region? How can we measure well-being/ happiness? Can we compare different European regions?

3. The question of how economic and social resilience depends on the way that a region is organising itself and diversifies relative dependence of positions in networks. As a large part of the local development depends on investment, trade relationships and knowledge elsewhere, the position one has in a network is crucial to shed light on.

René Kemp (Maastricht University) examines the phenomenon of Urban Labs. The program is called URB @ Exp. It analyses how urban experiments contribute to the cities development and what lessons those experiences yield for ‘urban governance’ and eventually how good practice can be scaled-up.

Interesting to investigate is the role that serious games or location based games can play in this context. Katharina Gugerell (University of Groningen), leads the program ‘play!UC. “Cities seen as systems are characterised by a high degree of complexity. Urban projects require the involvement of different stakeholders and actors. There is already a thing for developed, but challenges remain. How do you ensure that everyone involved in the long term and remains motivated? And how do you reach traditionally under-represented groups? We wonder whether serious games here have a useful role to play.”