A public theatre as a living lab to create resilience

This case study of Masca, the first Romanian public theatre to pilot a socio-ecological urban living lab (ULL), reassesses resilience through a resourcefulness lens. It explores the challenges and opportunities public cultural institutions face in reinventing themselves as facilitators of resilience practices. Masca ULL’s aims and activities are positioned as anticipated resilience practices: tried-and-tested sustainable practices cultivated through transdisciplinary collaboration and community engagement in commoning activities. Formal and informal stakeholder networks, organisational structures and key turning points in Masca’s ULL process are analysed. Two emergent forms of resilience are identified: (1) the capacity to build collective resilient action despite volatile social partnerships and weak support structures; and (2) the endurance to imagine and enact alternative futures despite little government support and even little social cohesion. An untapped potential exists for cultural institutions to connect social actors and to facilitate socio-ecological resilience. PRACTICE RELEVANCE Public cultural institutions, such as theatres, have a significant potential to cultivate and integrate sustainable practices and social cohesion at local and wider scales by reassessing and expanding their public functions. ULLs can provide the setting to test and prefigure alternative models that would enable public cultural institutions to act as facilitators for stakeholders from multiple sectors—administration/governance, research, business, communities—to collaborate and develop resilient socio-ecological practices in response to the most pressing issues faced by society, e.g. ecological crises. Apart from integrating tried-and-tested resilience practices, ULLs can develop methods to identify and maximise forms of resilience to address specific local circumstances with national and global scales.