The Challenge to Find Ideal Representation in Urban Living Labs: Lessons from the Maastricht case

Urban Living Labs (ULLs) are spaces in which ‘in situ’ experiments test the (dis)advantages and transformative potency of physical and social innovations. Unlike traditional labs, ULLs provide citizens and other stakeholders an opportunity to cocreate, try out and ‘try on’ potential changes to their cities’ environments. ULLs therefore seem to promise improved political representation over traditional modes of engagement. However, a ULL may build on different motivations than the enhancement of representativeness, and representation is seldom explicitly addressed. Similarly, whereas participation is extensively discussed in the scholarly discourse on ULLs, representation is not. The article draws from twenty-seven qualitative interviews with stakeholders involved in three urban space and mobility ULLs in the Dutch city of Maastricht to investigate attempts by the city and researchers to find ideal representation and the specific assumptions about representation that the respective ULLs embody. The analysis finds that representation is addressed in different ways, each attempt has its own enabling and constraining implications, and ULL leaders learn about these implications through this process of experimenting. The main inference derived is that, much as with participation, ideal representation in ULLs may be extremely difficult to achieve and to assess, owing to the processual, sometimes haphazard nature of its pursuit, and to contextual influences. Six particular challenges of finding ideal representation are also identified. The paper comes to the conclusion that the experimental ‘bundling’ and temporal longitudinality of ULLs may facilitate ongoing experimentation through which to dynamically ‘tune’ better citizen representation, but only if improved representation is an explicit goal and other institutional expectations or the uneven capacities and orientations of the public do not undermine these efforts.