Guidelines for Urban Labs

These guidelines are intended for team members and managers of urban labs and, more generally, for civil servants and facilitators in cities working with experimental processes to tackle complex challenges. They aim to support the everyday practice of collaboratively experimenting and learning how to create more sustainable and inclusive cities.

Policy-makers and urban development stakeholders may struggle to implement urban labs, and seek guidance for further development. Evidence-based guidelines and design principles are needed to decide for which types of challeng- es urban labs are most suited, how urban labs can best be organized in terms of structure, process and participation, and how urban labs can best be integrated into local government structures.

Why guidelines for Urban Labs?
The overarching aim of the URB@Exp project was to develop guidelines for urban labs, in order to enhance the successful uptake of this new form of urban governance and contribute to improved governance of urban complexity, creating more sustainable, inclusive, attractive and economically viable cities. The project’s action research approach ensured that various urban actors became effectively involved in the co-creation of these guidelines. Direct access to a variety of urban lab experiments and contexts through collaboration with ve city partners enabled the URB@Exp consortium to jointly develop these guidelines in a collaborative and iterative reflective process.


The eight guidelines are based on experiences and learnings from urban lab initiatives from five different European cities: Antwerp (B), Graz and Leoben (A), Maastricht (NL) and Malmö (S).

We do not pretend that these guidelines touch upon all possible challenges an urban lab may be confronted with, but we have incorporated all those we encountered in our collaborative project. In establishing each guideline theme, we identified common and recurrent patterns and positive attributes across urban experiments and urban labs in different urban contexts.

A fundamental insight emerging from URB@Exp is the importance for each urban lab to consider its own specific local conditions. Hence, the following guidelines do not provide a single definitive answer on ways to organize and run an urban lab or its experimental activities, but rather they offer, through frameworks and examples, guidance for ways to act in relation to, and reflect on, key issues.

We hope the result is inspiring and instructive for all those who want to wrap their minds around experimental co-creative approaches to urban governance and city development.