Rehearsing socio-technical mobility futures: Urban living labs, embodied learning, and situated urban experiments

Mobility transitions require more than techno-managerial processes and solutions. Urban living labs (ULLs) have been explored as potential arenas for addressing this challenge. In ULL-driven processes, citizens and societal actors engage in collaborative experiments in which they articulate diverse perspectives, issues are collectively formed and discussed, and ideas are tested in real-world settings. However, the existing ULL literature highlights critical challenges, particularly regarding issue definition and value creation. This paper argues that ULLs can be understood as contested socio-material arenas in which mobility transitions are practised. Adopting urban design and mobilities design approaches, the paper investigates the situated material agencies and embodied experiences through which issues and values are shaped, and how ULLs can function as venues for democratic practices that move beyond techno-managerial framings of mobility transition. It does so through a comparative analysis of two Danish cases with ULL-inspired characteristics: an autonomous shuttle bus trial in Aalborg East and temporary public space experiments in Randers city centre. The cases are investigated from within, providing a nuanced understanding of urban experiments as situated, embodied, and material processes. They show how collaborative experiments can unpack socio-contextual issues associated with technological change while enabling citizens to rehearse alternative futures. The paper thus contributes a situated, design-oriented perspective on ULLs by showing how mobility transitions are shaped through embodied, socio-material, and political processes rather than through technological implementation alone, and how value and issues emerge and are shaped in practice. At the same time, the paper shows the ambivalence of ULLs by unpacking both their democratic potential and their depoliticising risks, positioning them as contested arenas for negotiating sustainable mobility futures.