Urban Living Labs and Transformative Changes: A Qualitative Study of the Triadic Relationship Between Financing, Stakeholder Roles, and the Outcomes of Urban Living Labs in terms of Impact Creation in the City of Groningen.

When does a living lab lead to more than a pilot?

In this study, we asked why some Urban Living Labs create lasting value while others remain short-lived experiments. Cities increasingly use living labs to bring public institutions, researchers, businesses and residents together around sustainability challenges. But calling a project a living lab does not make it transformative. We wanted to understand how financing, stakeholder roles and outcomes work together to shape whether an experiment has influence beyond its own project period.

We combined a literature review with a qualitative comparison of three Urban Living Labs in Groningen. We understand these labs as a form of experimental governance: places where people test technologies, services and new ways of living together. This matters because urban transition is not only about technical innovation. It also involves policy, culture, infrastructure, markets, social networks and everyday practice. A useful lab must help knowledge, relationships and ownership travel beyond the pilot.

Funding and power shape what can continue

Our analysis focuses on a three-way relationship. Financing affects what can be started, sustained and scaled. Stakeholder roles affect whose knowledge, resources and priorities shape the work. Outcomes show whether the project produced more than activity during a grant period. We looked at enablers, providers, utilizers, users and researchers, as well as different funding arrangements. This made practical tensions visible: who carries risk, who has decision-making power and what happens when the funding ends?

Across the Groningen cases, trust-building mattered greatly. We do not treat trust as a vague bonus; it enables people to share direction, negotiate interests and stay involved when outcomes are uncertain. Shared ideology, agency and power matter too. A lab is more likely to contribute to change when people can influence the process rather than simply endorse a plan made elsewhere.

For us, the question is not only what a living lab is, but what makes it consequential. Financial sustainability, social adoption and long-term ownership must be part of the design from the beginning. Urban Living Labs can support fairer, more resilient change when they are built as durable relationships and learning infrastructures, with funding that matches that ambition and real room for stakeholder agency.