Urban Living Labs for the Development of Hybrid Research Methods in Contextualized Societal Challenges; the Example of Cultural Probes in Poverty Research in the Netherlands

Listening to poverty as it is lived

In this conference paper, we explored how Urban Living Labs can help research move closer to people’s everyday experience of poverty. Poverty is often discussed through income, statistics and policy categories. Those measures are important, but they do not fully show the relationships, routines, uncertainty and meanings that shape daily life. We wanted to find a way for people experiencing these conditions to describe what matters in their own terms, rather than asking them to fit their lives into someone else’s assumptions.

We used Cultural Probes: open and reflective assignments that invite participants to record habits, values, associations and ordinary experiences. Working with free Dutch-language classes at a language café in South Limburg, the ELSA Lab for Poverty and Debts, and specialists in poverty and cross-cultural communication, we introduced a probe booklet to cross-border migrants who were working on social integration. Participants used it over two to three weeks, then discussed their experiences with researchers, teachers and facilitators.

Adapting the method together

The initial approach had to change once we encountered a wider range of language levels than expected. Fourteen participants were divided into smaller groups and supported by researchers and language teachers. We see that adjustment as part of the research, not as an inconvenience around it. Asking people to share personal experience requires care, flexibility and a setting where participants can influence how the work is done. That is exactly what a living-lab approach can make possible.

The probes brought everyday realities into view. People mentioned free activities such as walking, reading and watching television; family and friends from their country of origin were central to many social networks. Conversations about friendship, health, money and the municipality showed that wellbeing cannot be reduced to income. Health was often described in terms of freedom, while family and friendship remained closely connected. For people living in asylum centres, limited resources, housing arrangements and distance from relatives shaped both immediate choices and their sense of the future.

We do not present Cultural Probes as a solution to poverty. What they offer is a better starting point for responsible action: a way to listen, test institutional assumptions and learn with residents, students, researchers and practitioners. In an Urban Living Lab, that shared learning can challenge the prejudice built into formal registers and help build responses around the social and cultural reality of people’s lives.