A living lab-based participatory protocol for urban heat adaptation decision-making: An application for identifying heat vulnerability and response priorities in Suwon, South Korea

Conventional heat vulnerability assessments tend to rely on air temperature, land surface temperature, and sociodemographic indicators, often overlooking residents' lived experiences and perceptions. Citizen participation is increasingly recognized as a key component of context-specific local adaptation, but it has often been limited to narrow and formalized forms of engagement. This study proposes and tests a participatory protocol that integrates citizen engagement into key stages of the heat adaptation decision-making process. The Suwon Living Lab combines participatory mapping, citizen science-based temperature measurements, and focus group workshops to identify places where residents experience heat impacts, capture local temperature variations, and elicit experiential knowledge and adaptation priorities. The results show that citizen participation helps identify locally relevant vulnerability factors, such as lack of shade, pedestrian density, and mobility-related exposure, that are not adequately captured by conventional assessments. In addition, participatory prioritization enabled the identification of policy-relevant intervention areas and context-specific adaptation needs. The findings demonstrate that residents tend to emphasize detailed environmental conditions and activity-based exposure contexts rather than temperature alone. By integrating local knowledge with citizen science data, priority areas such as Suwon Station and Hwaseo Station were identified. Overall, the proposed approach enables the co-production of locally grounded knowledge, improving the relevance, legitimacy, and effectiveness of adaptation decision-making. This study provides a transferable framework for incorporating citizen participation into urban climate adaptation planning.