Practicing Situated Action: Urban Living Labs and Volunteer Work

Urban Living Labs (ULLs) have become emblematic of experimental governance andparticipatory innovation in cities. Yet, despite their promise of co-production and inclusion,ULLs often reproduce existing hierarchies of authority and dominant epistemic regimes,leaving marginalized residents consulted but rarely heard. Drawing on ethnographic workcombined with volunteering in the stigmatized territory of Rotterdam South, this paperinterrogates the politics of participation in a ULL-situation. I show how epistemic and socialinjustices persist within participatory processes, shaped by the devices of policy, planningand knowledge production. Building on recent Science and Technology Studies (STS) andIsabelle Stengers’s speculative realist philosophy, I propose to reimagine ULLs as potentialtransformational devices for epistemic and social justice – sites where the conditions forrecognizing and articulating stigmatized knowledges can be experimentally and experientiallyreconfigured from a liminal place. Rather than seeking closure or consensus, a speculativerealist ethos values rare, trans-situational events that slow down and unsettle establishedepistemic regimes and open new possibilities for public action. The paper concludes bycalling for scholars’ commitment to ongoing experimentation, reflexivity, and a commitmentto being unsettled by the situated production of knowledge outside of the academy.