MITx: Transformative Living Labs in Urban Climate Action and Transportation Planning

“Transformative Living Labs in Mobility” introduces living laboratory model of achieving sustainable urban mobility systems. The goal of the course is to explore the ways that multiple stakeholders and agencies organize and investigate living labs to find solutions for urban mobility.

Mobility planning plays a key role in building more sustainable cities and providing equitable access to economic opportunities, education, healthcare and social activities. The living lab concept can be a helpful tool to achieve these goals. This co-development process forms coalitions that enable transformative change, addresses climate change, and supports inclusive, sustainable urban development. Urban change makers can use the living labs approach to highlight the benefits of innovations and interventions and test the validity in collaboration with authorities, academia, civil society, private sector and end-users.

This course will bring all relevant aspects of living labs together into a coherent approach for testing innovative sustainable mobility solutions in urban living labs, and will highlight interlinkages and priorities in the planning and implementation process. It features projects currently implemented through Urban Pathways and SOLUTIONSplus, and was developed with support from UN Habitat.

This course is designed for learners in:

international organizations

local or national governments

consultancies

private industry and finance

incubators and start-ups

Especially important are audiences in developing countries, where urbanization and transportation infrastructure are rapidly developing and outdated, inequitable, and carbon-intensive approaches may be leapfrogged.