Co-creating solutions with social housing users: a Living lab case

ABSTRACT

Social housing (SH) upgrade processes have the potential to reduce social costs, improve living conditions, and increase the satisfaction of dwellers. All stakeholders, especially end-users, should participate in such processes to identify needs and problems and evaluate proposals. The Living Lab (LL) approach is recommended to develop solutions in a real-life context, and collaboration among participants. Our study explores this to involve residents of SH in enhancing their neighbourhood, positively influencing their satisfaction with their living environment, and improving their quality of life. We pursued this objective by exploring participatory tools. We present co-creation activities to develop upgrade proposals for communal areas. From our analysis of these co-creation activities, important lessons are learned on resident engagement in social housing upgrade processes. Our contributions include a set of practical advice for conducting co-creation activities in Living Labs for social housing upgrades and a demonstration of how research organisations can utilise Living Labs to empower users in creating their social innovation projects.

KEYWORDS:

• Living labs
• co-creation
• social housing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For additional information please access uVital’s website: http://www.fec.unicamp.br/~uvital/

2. This research was registered in the Brazilian study platform control (Plataforma Brasil) and approved by the University of Campinas Ethics Committee for Research in the Human and Social Sciences (CAAE: 36778620.0.0000.8142). All participants were fully informed of the research purposes and risks and signed the consent form before enrolling in the study.

3. The minimum wage in Brazil (2024) corresponds to R$1412.00 (around U$287.15 in January, 25th, 2024).

Additional information

Funding

This article reports on partial results from the uVITAL project, funded by the TransAtlantic Platform for Social Sciences and Humanities [ES/T015160/1]. The authors thank the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo—FAPESP [Process #2019/02240-5]; Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel—CAPES for their generous funding support; and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development—CNPq for the individual productivity grants [303508/2021-3 and 314760/2023-7].