Green Urban Living Lab Arnhem

On June 12th 2025 we will celebrate the 7th edition of the international Outdoor Office Day. It’s an open invitation to take your work outside, reconnect with the surrounding urban nature around your office.

This year’s theme is 'Connecting with each other’: with your direct colleagues, colleagues from other departments, neighbours, or external relations. Please join the growing network of individuals and companies that take their work outside more and more often. Get inspired whilst you spend time surrounded by urban nature. This enhances new and meaningful relationships, stimulates the flow of good ideas and supports the forging of valuable collaborations.

Please meet our partners and participants:

https://www.outdoorofficeday.nl/participants

If in Amsterdam we invite for wanderwalk with sustainable leaders. Join us in Amsterdamse Bos to discuss your dilemma's, learn from each other and connect.

Have you obtained a master's degree in social and/or organization sciences, and would you like to study innovation and change? Then consider joining our interdisciplinary team with a PhD research on accelerating sustainability transitions!

This PhD position is part of an interdisciplinary team of three PhD researchers, one postdoc, and two senior researchers in the project ‘EXTRA’: <em>From EXperiment to sustainable change: TRAnsformative methodologies for innovation and learning</em>. EXTRA is a collaboration between multiple universities and public and private partners to research and advance physical and experimental environments as enabling methodologies for learning and innovation, also known as living labs.

Living labs are applied by various change-makers, including governmental actors, industry partners, NGOs, researchers, and citizens, to co-create innovations. However, while much experimentation and innovation occur, achieving long-term systemic change remains difficult. Therefore, the main purpose of EXTRA is to amplify the transformative power of living labs with novel insights, instruments, and human capacities, thus enabling change-makers to make sustainable changes and societal impacts. 

In the consortium this PhD research will focus on the organization of innovation to accelerate sustainability transition. More specifically, by gathering knowledge and analyses across different fields and cases, this research will identify and validate (inter)organizational approaches, interventions, and business models to overcome barriers and enable the public-private collaboration needed for embedding, translating, and scaling innovations.

For more information about the project, please visit: https://www.nwo.nl/nieuws/financiering-voor-onderzoeksproject-over-fysieke-experimentele-omgevingen ; https://www.tudelft.nl/2024/bk/nwo-financiering-voor-innovatief-onderzoek-naar-fysieke-experimentele-omgevingen. 

Er zijn allerlei manieren om luchtkwaliteit te meten, met sensoren, filters of zelfs met planten! Verken met Urgenda de mogelijkheden van natuurlijke sensoren: boomschors van platanen. Deze Waag Open vormt de aftrap van de landelijke actie van Urgenda: De plataan-check. 

Platanen kunnen met hun schors veel vertellen over de hoeveelheid fijnstof in hun omgeving. In hun bast slaan ze (fijn)stof uit hun omgeving op. Onderzoekers kunnen met laboratoriumonderzoek uit de bast aflezen hoeveel fijnstof er in de omgeving van de boom is uitgestoten. 

Samen met Urgenda verzamelen we tijdens Waag Open boomschors van de plataan. Daarbij vertelt Urgenda hoe plataanschors inzicht geeft in de hoeveelheid fijnstof in Nederland. Daarnaast leidt Imme Ruarus, hoofd van Waag’s Smart Citizens Lab, de avond in met een introductie over citizen sensing: hoe bewoners met technologische metingen, natuurlijke metingen en observaties hun leefomgeving in kaart brengen.
Na Waag Open kun je zelf aan de slag met plataanschors verzamelen en meedoen met de plataan-check!