What’s a Living Lab, Anyway?
A Living Lab is a bit like opening the city and turning it into a shared workshop. Instead of testing ideas behind closed doors, people go out into streets, neighbourhoods, and public spaces to explore real questions with real communities. Students walk, map, observe, and talk with the people who live and care for these places. Activists bring their stories; researchers bring tools; institutions bring responsibilities; and together they build something that none of them could design alone.
What makes a Living Lab special is its mix of experimentation and everyday life.
You learn while doing, and you change things while learning. Sometimes this means testing new ways of using streets or squares. Other times it’s about noticing invisible barriers, understanding who feels welcome (or excluded), or imagining how a place could work differently. It’s messy, creative, and often surprising — and that’s the point.
In PS-U-GO, Living Labs become open classrooms spread across real cities. They help people discover how participation actually works: not only through meetings and plans, but through curiosity, care, conflict, collaboration, and the small moments that shape urban life.
PS-U-GO brings together four Urban Living Labs across Europe — in Cottbus, Naples, Palermo, and Nicosia. Each city opens a different doorway into understanding how people shape and share their urban spaces. In Cottbus, students explore how a transforming post-coal landscape can inspire new futures. In Naples, communities reclaim their coastline as a commons.
Palermo experiments with neighbourhood activism and everyday care. Nicosia works across divided urban spaces to imagine more connected ways of living. Together, these four labs show how learning, collaboration, and imagination can spark real change.
