BELgrade Urban Living LAB

BELgrade urban living LAB (BELLAB) is a collaborative environment where citizens, the public sector, planning experts, and private companies work together to co-create solutions in response to complex urban and climate-related challenges, e.g. climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction and climate resilience, reduction of air and soil pollution, urban biodiversity protection, healthy city promotion, sustainable urban mobility planning. BELLAB was established in 2020, as a result of inter- institutional collaboration on two Horizon 2020 projects related to climate change mapping and adaptation strategies: CLEVER Cities and TeRRIFICA, as the first Urban Living Lab in Serbia and the Western Balkans. As such, it has a high potential to pave the road for ULL approach dissemination within the region. BELLAB is more than just a testbed platform since it provides experimentation in a real-life setting, located in the city of Belgrade. Amidst rising urbanization and political challenges, intensified by the global ecological and economic crisis, the Living Lab approach provides a new and creative solution for the implementation of public policies and urban design projects.The multifaceted goal of BELLAB is to overcome silos thinking caused by disciplinary boundaries, to envisage and engage various groups of stakeholders, empower citizens, to bridge top-down and bottom-up initiatives, and provide a shared vision of better quality of life in Belgrade.