Connecting Urban Transformation Labs to understand, anticipate and leverage resilient and sustainable cities and their surrounding areas

Functional urban areas have to adapt to ever evolving challenges from climate change to digitalization to become sustainable and resilient. These complex transformation processes also require an evolution of scientific approaches. Towards this end, we explore the question: How can we better understand, anticipate, and enable transformations towards resilient and sustainable cities through interconnected Urban Transformation Lab research? In this paper we outline a comprehensive conceptual framework to guide the establishment and operation of 3-5 interconnected Urban Transformation Labs that shall be established in a multi-year approach in several cities in Germany run by several Helmholtz Centers. The framework is built on three central pillars: observation, simulation, and experimentation. The overarching goal is to use insights from urban observatories (pillar 1) gathering various environmental and spatial data as a basis for both the digital tools, such as simulation and visualizations (pillar 2), as well as the experimentation together with stakeholders in the real world (pillar 3). Ultimately, the conceptual framework will enable transferability of the approach as well as cross-case comparison between multiple labs in different contexts tackling a variety of challenges and employing a number of solutions.