Urban rooms and the expanded ecology of urban living labs

Urban living labs (ULLs) deal with complex urban futures by acting as translators between research and urban co-production processes. The ‘urban room’ (UR) typology is a space for diverse actors and citizens to co-create city futures. This paper examines how the situated, hybrid and participatory methods of the URs compare with those of ULLs. This reveals similarities and differences in building resilience. URs are positioned as place-based infrastructures and active sites of multiplicity, where diverse communities can transform the city, decentring experts in urban transformations. A UR case study of collaborative civic regeneration in Sheffield, UK, is explored through a situated and diffractive analysis. Effective new methods are found to be speculative openness, generative witnessing and inhabiting detachments. These methods are complementary to ULLs and enlist a multiplicity of voices engaged in the co-production of urban knowledge. An expanded ecology of URs and ULLs would enrich ‘dialogical spaces’ within cities towards achieving just adaptation and resilience. Policy relevance Engaging diverse communities in entangled challenges of city and planetary futures is crucial, yet significant gaps exist, especially concerning minority populations in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 datasets. ‘UR’ can nurture diverse partnerships and resilient forms of urban co-production by reaching new communities in sites of concern. This approach expands the ULL methods by addressing the critical planning challenge of inclusive community engagement for equitable urban development. URs provide new tactics that engage diverse actors and give voice to marginalised people. This long-term, situated and additive practice can transform the diversity of engagement, foster a plurality of urban futures and create novel forms of hybrid governance.