Enhancing community learning through learning loops inside urban living labs: how to improve urban co-design

For the renovation and regeneration of urban areas, co-design involving citizens is a practice that is diffusing, but usually the results are not satisfying, and the possible learning occasions for participants are lost and knowledge produced inside laboratories dispersed. With the LOOPER (Learning Loops in the Public Realm) project, the goal is to bring the learning process inside the Urban Living Labs involved in the co-design process. Considering the Living Labs as design strategies focused on the experimentation and on the end user, in our research, Urban Living Labs are open innovative systems based on a systematic approach of co-creation with the user within public-private-citizen partnerships, which integrates research and community participation processes in real environments. Within LOOPER a set of steps are followed to activate a learning process that is organized in two loops. There are 3 stages for each loop: 1. Identification of problems (1a. Scoping; 1b. Data collection; 1c. Visualisation); 2. Co-design and evaluation of alternative solutions (2a. Co-design; 2b. Evaluation); 3. Implementation and monitoring (3a. Implementation; 3b. Monitoring). Stakeholders actively participate to all stages starting from the identification of problems until the implementation and monitoring of what have been done. During these activities, different ‘learning moments’ are turned on inside the community and inside institutions. Each ‘learning moment’ is characterized by a ‘functional’ or ‘strategic’ learning. This paper – where the pilot case of South Verona from LOOPER will be considered – will describe how the Learning Loop process is organized within Urban Living Labs to trigger the different types of learning in order to improve the co-design activity. In the paper it will also be explained how this process of learning will help the community to perpetuate the learning and co-design processes.