Word Cloud - What does UNIC CityLabs mean to you?

To start with, let's remind ourselves what UNIC CityLabs are and how they work. UNIC CityLabs were conceived as a key instrument of the UNIC Alliance - with the ambition to have an urban living lab at the heart of our University that focuses on challenge-based, co-creative problem-solving in real-world contexts.

CityLabs brings together citizens and stakeholders from the public sector, business, civil society, education and research to work on co-creating solutions to the societal challenges faced in our post-industrial cities. In short, CityLabs bring the university closer to the city, and vice versa.

Informed by a robust Literature Review and Benchmark Analysis, a 3-step process was set out for the work of designing, testing and building CityLabs under UNIC 1.0. Firstly, the university community, city stakeholders and citizens engage locally to identify and explore local challenges. We refer to local engagement events as ‘pop-ups’ Secondly, those challenges are brought to an international level, connecting across the alliance to collaborate on co-creating solutions, which can be applied to different post-industrial environments. We refer to virtual international engagements as ‘Virtual meeting Platforms’. Finally, the last stage consists of bringing the co-created ideas to the local environment and working collaboratively with stakeholders to implement innovative models, actions and interventions for positive societal impact. ​

Through UNIC CityLabs we can enable and embed co-creative problem-solving expertise, methods and modalities within the 10 universities and cities that form the UNIC Alliance. Our final goal is for UNIC CityLabs to become a best-practice model that can be replicated in other post-industrial areas in Europe, and even around the rest of the world!