Living Labs as Leverage for a Sustainable Transition: Overview of Student Research in the Caribbean Context

Abstract

As there has been an increasing awareness of the severity and consequences of global warming over recent decades, there has also been increasing efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Despite sustainable transition is collectively agreed upon, tangible actions in the Caribbean context are limited. Unsustainable daily practices in the built environment are usually embedded in wider sociotechnological systems that are resistant to radical change and innovation. Transition management approaches and instruments such as living labs provide a new orientation to societal change. It aims for the creation of sustainable innovative practices within socio technical niches, which may have the potential to upscale to wider systemic transformations. In recent years, the architecture students of the Faculty of Design Sciences at the University of Antwerp have conducted research targeting sustainability within the Caribbean context. A wide range of topics were addressed, e.g. schools, healthcare and campuses. On the theoretical background of living labs, this paper discusses exemplary results of student research. More in specific, research on energy efficient campus design and management is addressed. Regarding the latter, reference will be made to the conducted workshops of the Edulink project. The objective is: in general, to provide incentives to close the gap between ‘rhetoric’ and ‘reality’; and in specific, to increase the awareness of the potentials of existing urban developments, e.g. campuses, for sustainability. The underlying objective is to highlight living labs and transition management in education and training as a ‘short cut’ towards a sustainable transition.