Urban Living Labs as Innovation Infrastructure for Local Urban Intervention Acceleration and Student Social Learning: the Impacts on Community Wellbeing in Heerlen

A living lab can make local change more collective

In this research, we examined Urban Living Labs as infrastructure for accelerating local interventions and supporting student social learning in Heerlen-North. The GMS neighbourhood faces long-standing challenges connected to the region’s mining history: energy poverty, low literacy, cultural diversity, unemployment, low incomes, ageing, stigma and health inequality. We focused on the Aurora apartment building and its surroundings, using placemaking and the Living Lab to connect intervention, collaboration and learning.

We start from the idea that a city is not just a place where plans are applied. It is a platform for social transformation that needs active involvement from residents and local stakeholders. Traditional planning can be rigid, sectoral and tied to predetermined outcomes. Placemaking and Urban Living Labs offer a more experimental route: begin with local experience, test small context-specific interventions and create a learning arena for residents, professionals, researchers, students and organisations. The purpose is not only physical improvement, but a stronger relationship between people and the place they share.

Community wellbeing and learning develop together

Aurora has more than 200 homes and residents from over sixty nationalities. It has been renovated and received a large mural, but we asked how change could extend beyond a building upgrade into community wellbeing. Public space, social interaction, familiarity, safety, belonging, inclusion and opportunities to participate all influence how people experience health and daily life. A healthy neighbourhood cannot be reduced to physical quality.

We found two key contributions. First, a Living Lab can accelerate local action by bringing together the values, needs and knowledge already present in a neighbourhood. This creates alternatives to top-down planning and can address loneliness, exclusion and democratic decision-making more directly. Second, it provides infrastructure for educational innovation. Students work with residents and practitioners on real socio-urban questions, learning across disciplines rather than only from lectures or simulations.

We do not present the lab as a quick fix. Urban experiments are contextual, open-ended and political. Their value is in maintaining conditions for co-creation, reflection and adaptation. In Heerlen, the lab connects education, research, policy, design and everyday life. Elsewhere, it offers a practical case for how community wellbeing and student learning can grow together when transformation is treated as a collective process.