Creating a Future-Oriented Research Agenda for Revitalizing Wasted Urban Spaces through Collaborative Writing: An Interdisciplinary Living Lab Approach

Amid growing environmental concerns, there is an increasing demand for creative research that addresses impending crises while simultaneously imagining sustainable modes of living for humans, non-humans (materials) and other-than-humans (nature) to coexist in urban regions. We engaged a mixture of junior and senior scholars from a variety of disciplines in a forward thinking, collaborative grant writing process inspired by an embodied experience of and exposure to a mixture of sustainability projects at the edges of society. Our UNA Europa writers collective aimed to answer the following question: how can urban regions be revitalized to build a more sustainable and inclusive living environment? Guided by the concepts circularity and patchwork methodology, we focused on neglected, wasted spaces in society with potential. We explored how co-creation through collective proposal writing rooted in living lab experiences can spark scholar’s imagination about what the nearby future could look like. We cognitively hacked or sensed interesting spaces and mapped out what could potentially be done to initiate meaningful change in order to move from the idea of wasted spaces to wasteless societies. This resulted in a patchwork of relevant, testable ideas for interventions in the urban sphere, inspired by seven types of intelligences answering ‘what-if’ questions that popped up during our process of engagement with the field; artificial, artisanal, kaleidoscopic, systemic, energetic and spatial intelligence. In conceptualizing our ideas we were mindful about creating conditions for engaging citizens with the speculative revitalization interventions in the urban sustainability sector.