1. Introduction
Urban living labs (ULLs) have become integral to urban design, planning and policy literature as both geographically bound spaces and methodological frameworks for collaborative experimentation. They facilitate co-creation between diverse stakeholders to generate solutions to urban challenges (Mccormick & Hartmann 2017). JPI Urban Europe (n.d.) describes ULLs as an umbrella notion encompassing:
methods, approaches and projects that substantially include urban actors in processes of co-creation, co-production, learning-loops, and experimental approaches to improve urban life.
Conventionally, ULLs operate through structured systems, such as the Quadruple Helix model, which brings together government, industry, academia and civil society in processes of multi-stakeholder innovation (Carayannis & Campbell 2009). Their defining characteristics are leadership, evaluation, experimentation, engagement and spatial embeddedness (Bulkeley et al. 2016).
ULLs have been explored as platforms for the co-production of space and knowledge in real-world settings (Petrescu et al. 2022). They build social capital among participants by engaging academics, researchers, government officials, the private sector and citizens in participatory approaches (Juujärvi & Pesso 2013). In most cases, institutional actors such as universities and governments play the role of initiators or drivers (Petrescu et al. 2022), facilitating collaborations (Juujärvi & Pesso 2013) and strategically steering objectives to align with broader innovation frameworks and municipal agendas (Mccormick & Hartmann 2017; Piziak et al. 2023).
Despite their participatory rhetoric, ULLs have been critiqued for their technocentric and instrumental focus, which often prioritises technological innovation and efficiency over social equity. Scholars have also noted their governance is frequently centralised, with institutional actors exercising implicit authority and setting parameters of participation, rather than building on the agency of community members (Belfield & Petrescu 2024; von Wirth et al. 2019). This risks imposing an implicit hierarchy that limits the agency of grassroots groups and disregards situated forms of knowledge.
While institutionally led ULLs—defined as strategic and civic by the Urban Europe project Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions (GUST) (Mccormick & Hartmann 2017)—have been vastly studied, discussions on grassroots-led agencies remain more limited.
In response to the considerations and limitations of ULLs, some authors have called for the expansion of their structure towards a socially engaged approach. Recent literature has increasingly foregrounded grassroots-led initiatives as autonomous, community-driven platforms for experimentation and innovation that operate outside traditional institutional frameworks. This gave rise to various terminologies such as socially oriented urban living labs (SOULLs) (von Wirth et al. 2019), ecopolitical grassroots urban labs (GULs) (Sager 2024), ULLs initiated by the grassroots (Belfield & Petrescu 2024) and also the more commonly used ‘grassroots innovation’ (Roysen & Mertens 2019; Seyfang & Smith 2007). Such reframing not only emphasises inclusivity and institutional reflexivity but also addresses systemic urban inequalities and functions that mediate between formal governance structures and everyday urban practices.
The literature on grassroots innovation (Seyfang & Smith 2007; Sager 2024) as well as commoning practices (e.g. Baibarac & Petrescu 2019; Bertolino & Delsante 2018; Petrescu & Petcou 2021; Stavrides 2016) indicates that self-organised initiatives can function as living labs (LLs) in their own right because of their practices related to testing out, co-creating, negotiating various spatial practices as well as infrastructures of care. However, there is scope to investigate further how grassroots-led labs generate knowledge, the methodologies delineating their practices and their interaction with institutional frameworks.
It should also be noted that such experiences often intersect other theoretical dimensions, e.g. that of the commons and/or the common. Following Stavrides (2016), the commons is defined here as a mode of spatial production grounded in practices of commoning: the collectively negotiated rules, thresholds, and uses that keep spaces open and generative. In the housing field, housing as commons (Stavrides & Travlou 2022) gathers global cases—cooperatives, refugee housing squats, autonomous neighbourhoods—showing how collective dwelling creates instituted practices of sharing that are neither public nor private but relational and self-governed. These experiences resonate with insurgent planning (Miraftab 2009), where civic actors appropriate and resignify spaces against technocratic and market logics.
These practices are sustained through what is referred to here as gifting economies: informal systems of mutual aid, resource-sharing and voluntary contributions that operate outside monetary exchange logics. While this notion draws from Maussian ideas of reciprocity (Mauss 1925/1954), in the present context it aligns more closely with contemporary work on non-commercial sharing practices in urban settings, where value is produced relationally and collectively, rather than through market-based transactions (Keller et al. 2024; Cermeno et al. 2025). These grassroots-led economies reflect broader movements toward the sharing city paradigm, in which civic groups create alternative infrastructures of solidarity and everyday urban commoning.
This paper builds on the co-production of the Commoning Kirklees (CK) toolkit, which was developed within a wider grassroots initiative called Fartown Forest Garden (FFG) in West Yorkshire, UK. This study highlights a methodological innovation where ULLs are informed and guided by grassroots perspectives. In doing so, it asks the following research questions:
How do grassroots actors and embedded researchers co-design practical tools that support citizen-led innovation?
What processes and forms of knowledge emerge through this co-production, and how do they reframe the methods of LLs?
What challenges arise when academic actors participate in grassroots-led initiatives, and how do questions of positionality shape outcomes?
By situating the CK toolkit within both grassroots activism and the wider LL literature, the paper shows how community-led experimentation methodologies can inform, enrich and challenge the existing ULL framework.
2. Operational and methodological considerations
While LLs have become widely adopted in different contexts, their methodology and operational unfolding remain partially contested and fragmented, with several overlapping or diverging interpretations (Kviselius et al. 2009; Tang et al. 2012).
Methodologically, mainstream ULLs (Malmberg et al. 2017) adopt structured innovation cycles typically based on co-creation, prototyping, evaluation and scaling (Steen & van Bueren 2017), and mix qualitative facilitation with user studies, pilot testing and, where feasible, quasi-experimental or randomised controlled trial (RCT) designs. Research designs are often multi-stakeholder and phase-based, drawing on living test beds and designated pilot sites (Bulkeley et al. 2016; Mccormick & Hartmann 2017; Juujärvi & Pesso 2013). Operationally, they are institution-led (municipalities, universities, industry consortia) and governed through formal agreements, steering groups and intellectual property (IP)/data protocols. Typical tools include stakeholder workshops, service and policy prototyping, instrumentation of test beds, key performance indicator (KPI) dashboards, and cost–benefit or policy-integration assessments. Evidence is primarily output/outcome-oriented (performance, adoption, integration into policy or markets), underpinned by institutional ethics review processes. Scalability is pursued via standardisation, playbooks and policy uptake, often within smart-city or innovation-programme frameworks. However, scholars have stressed their reliance on institutional leadership and structured forms of collaboration, which may risk marginalising grassroots innovation and bottom-up transformative potential (Bulkeley et al. 2016; Belfield & Petrescu 2024; Sager 2024).
Several authors have proposed to capture differences among LL methodologies, distinguishing, for example, between open and closed modes of user involvement, or between different types of platform technologies. Building on design research debates, other scholars have interpreted LLs as a distinct methodology that bridges user-centred and participatory design approaches (Dell’Era & Landoni 2014) In this interpretation, the originality of LLs lies precisely in their hybrid positioning: like applied ethnography, they situate the design process within everyday contexts; like lead user innovation, they mobilise engaged users who contribute to knowledge; and like participatory design, they rely on co-creation, supported by artefacts, prototypes and collaborative tools (Ball & Ormerod 2000).
What these works confirm is that the LL methodology is not prescriptive but adaptive, able to integrate different degrees of openness, user roles and forms of co-creation depending on the context. As mentioned above, recent attempts have tried to elaborate on the concept of LL by closely positioning it in relation to societal needs and aspirations.
SOULLs retain the LL cycle, but respecify it around social goals and equity criteria (von Wirth et al. 2019). Methodologically, they foreground participatory action research, community charrettes, social needs assessments, and capability or equity mapping. Prototyping is still present, but tested against social impact indicators (inclusion, wellbeing, participation), and evaluation relies on mixed methods with explicit equity-focused rubrics. Operationally, governance is hybrid: institutions remain sponsors/hosts, yet community organisations co-steer agendas and evaluation. Tools emphasise co-design of programmes, neighbourhood labs and social-impact prototyping rather than technology-first pilots. Ethics extend beyond formal approvals to safeguarding practices for vulnerable groups. Scaling occurs through non-governmental organisations (NGOs), civic programmes and policy instruments that diffuse socially validated practices, not only technical solutions.
With specific reference to grassroots and their relationships to urban labs or LLs, some experiences emphasise informal governance, local agency and self-managed processes of commoning (Petrescu et al. 2022; Baibarac & Petrescu 2019). They are frequently rooted in practices of everyday activism (Chatterton & Pickerill 2010) and alternative forms of spatial production that challenge capitalist modes of urban development (Pickerill & Chatterton 2006; Sager 2024). Defined as grassroots labs, these typologies are driven by civil society or non-profit organisations and focus on wellbeing and economic issues through small-scale or single-issue projects, operating within tight budget constraints (Urban Europe GUST).
In line with the above, GULs are defined as those where:
associations in the community or local groups of commons people design and instigate the urban experiments.
While sometimes grassroots-led labs go under the radar in the literature, being merged with other similar or more generic terms (e.g. organic, grassroots innovations, etc.), Bulkeley et al. (2019: 323) characterise them as:
concerned with highly contingent and specific contextual issues that are related to the needs and priorities of particular communities and/or neighbourhoods
and where the key actors come from civil society and not-for-profit groups. These are usually geographically confined and bounded spaces for experimentation, acting at the fringe of existing organisational, political social and/or institutional arrangements in society (McCrory et al. 2020: 2). In the end, Sager (2024: 4) defines GULs as peculiar urban labs with:
sufficient autonomy from public and private authorities to decide which potentially transformative experiments to plan, carry out and follow up. GULs [grassroots urban labs] are free to decide with whom to cooperate and how to experiment.
As such, their experiments for transition are bottom-up and participatory.
While Sager (2024) coined GULs to define autonomous citizen-led experiments, in this paper the term ‘grassroots-led living labs’ (GLLs) is adopted to maintain the theoretical continuity with the wider literature of LLs. To this end, the term not only encompasses the grassroots context of these bottom-up initiatives but also stresses the potential of grassroots agency to inform the existing methodologies of LLs from a bottom-up perspective. GLLs, therefore, describe those LLs that originate from grassroots experiences, but which evolve through co-production between various actors, including community agents and researchers, integrating situated co-produced knowledge and informal governance as core components of the experimentation.
Methodologically, GULs adopt a qualitative, design-led case study suited to ecopolitical, experimental microsocieties (Sager 2024), combining embedded ethnography, semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis with participatory co-design. In general, in grassroots experiences, participant observation within everyday practices captures prefigurative, commoning routines and situated learning (Chatterton & Pickerill 2010; Petrescu et al. 2022). Moreover, interviews with core members, allied third-sector organisations, neighbours and municipal interlocutors elicit governance arrangements, conflict lines and boundary-spanning roles (von Wirth et al. 2019; Bulkeley et al. 2016). Additionally, document analysis (house rules, minutes, charters, zines, policy correspondence) traces instituted practices and their evolution (Seyfang & Smith 2007). Building on ULL traditions of experimentation and learning loops (Mccormick & Hartmann 2017; Juujärvi & Pesso 2013; Steen & van Bueren 2017), the GUL and GLL literatures showcase the use of co-design workshops and prototyping of a community toolkit, using iterative testing to surface tacit knowledge and stress-test stewardship protocols (Baibarac & Petrescu 2019). Situated mapping/counter-mapping visualises spatial and social infrastructures, while actor/power mapping identifies informal leadership and gatekeeping. Analytically, process tracing links micro-experiments to shifts in governance and urban rule-making, privileging mechanism-focused evaluation (learning, diffusion, embedding) over output metrics (Bulkeley et al. 2016; von Wirth et al. 2019; Tsekleves et al. 2024). Throughout, GULs and GLLs maintain a reflexive stance on positionality and reciprocity, consistent with research in self-organised settings and with the practical relevance of such experiences as infrastructures for collective capacity-building.
A summary of the methodological features of ULLs, SOULLs and GULs is shown in Table 1.
Table 1
Summary of the methodological features of three different living labs (LLs).
| DIMENSION | URBAN LIVING LABS (ULLs) (MAINSTREAM) | SOCIALLY ORIENTED URBAN LIVING LABS (SOULLs) (von Wirth et al. 2019) | GRASSROOTS URBAN LABS (GULs) (Sager 2024) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leadership and governance | Institution-led (municipality/university/industry); formal governance | Institution supported with stronger social orientation; hybrid governance | Citizen-led, informal governance; ecopolitical/insurgent orientation |
| Setting of experimentation | Designated LL sites, pilots, living test beds | Community programmes, social innovation pilots, neighbourhood labs | Everyday practices; contested/alternative spaces; prefigurative action |
| Primary designs | Structured LL phases (co-creation → prototyping → evaluation → scaling) (Steen & van Bueren 2017); user studies; randomised controlled trial (RCT)/quasi-experimental where feasible | Participatory action research; social impact prototyping; LL cycles with socially targeted criteria | Ethnography, embedded/participatory action research; co-design as commoning; situated/counter-mapping; process tracing of insurgent change |
| Typical tools | Stakeholder workshops; service prototyping; test-bed instrumentation; key performance indicator (KPI) dashboards; cost–benefit/policy evaluation | Community charrettes; social needs assessment; capability mapping; equity-focused evaluation rubrics | Participant observation; governance diaries; repertoire analysis of commoning practices; gift-economy/resource flow mapping; boundary objects (e.g. community toolkits); conflict and actor mapping |
| Evidence and evaluation | Outputs/outcomes: performance, adoption, policy integration; mixed-methods with stronger formal metrics | Social outcomes: inclusion, wellbeing, participation; mixed-methods with equity indicators | Mechanisms: empowerment, autonomy, solidarity, diffusion; narrative and process evidence; reflexive accounts |
| Ethics/positionality | Institutional ethics/review protocols; intellectual property (IP)/data governance | As for ULLs, plus explicit safeguards for vulnerable groups | Strong reflexivity; reciprocity; co-ownership of data/artefacts |
| Scalability/diffusion | Standardisation, policy uptake, vendor ecosystems | Programmatic scaling via social policy and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) | Peer-to-peer replication; federated commons; toolkits as boundary objects |
Within this framework, the CK toolkit exemplifies how a GLL methodology operates in practice. Rather than being a static output, the process of tool-making itself became a site of experimentation and co-production. Through workshops, co-design and testing sessions, the toolkit mobilised knowledge, mediated group dynamics and translated everyday activism into concrete strategies. In this sense, the CK process demonstrates that an LL ‘in action’ does not merely produce knowledge about participation, but actively reconfigures the social and political infrastructures in which grassroots innovation unfolds.
This paper situates the CK toolkit within this evolving landscape of LL practices. While mainstream ULLs and SOULLs provide valuable institutional and social innovation models, they often remain constrained by top-down governance. The CK toolkit, by contrast, exemplifies a grassroots-led methodology, emerging from the FFG project and co-produced with citizens, activists and community groups.
As such, CK contributes to the literature not by adding another typological variant of ULL, but by demonstrating methodological innovation: how toolkits can function as mediating infrastructures that embed grassroots epistemologies, redistribute authorship and sustain collective agency. Positioned as a GLL, the CK case foregrounds how everyday practices of commoning can be translated into practical, open-access resources that strengthen community capacity and extend the methodological repertoire of LL scholarship.
3. Co-producing the commoning kirklees (CK) toolkit
The empirical evidence presented in this paper is from a research project conducted between 2021 and 2023 in which a portion of under-used council-owned land was reclaimed as a community space by a self-organised group of activist citizens and embedded researchers. Through community-led reappropriation actions to create a new community space, the group activated a user-led project (van den Nouwelant 2019), which, although small-scale and temporary, motivated the spatial agents to engage in governance and management of the space through a bottom-up strategy and without the private sector or the council’s recognition.
The research followed an embedded approach where the researchers were working as participant-researchers within the grassroots group, combining participatory design, co-production methods and commoning principles. Their everyday, situated actions—rooted in gifting economies, emotional labour and local knowledge—align with what Chatterton & Pickerill (2010) term everyday activism: small-scale, experimental practices tied to the lived needs of the community. This, in turn, shaped socially managed and (re)produced space called the Fartown Forest Garden (FFG) located in West Yorkshire, which provides the grounding context of this research.
Alongside the socio-spatial action of reclaiming the land, a practical toolkit was also developed collectively to support such citizen-led actions. The CK toolkit was not only an outcome of this process but also a central methodological intervention aimed to support and extend such informal, citizen-led initiatives. It took the form of a graphical workbook containing guidelines, open-access resources, and local case studies to support existing and future informal groups to self-organise, co-produce their governance structure, manage group dynamics and handle bureaucratic hurdles.
Although the FFG project was not conceived as an LL by its initiators, the CK methodology shares what LLs often emphasise on experimentation and co-production. Here, co-production as a collective and development of alternative strategies were foundational in creating a new non-commodified platform for active citizenship and knowledge dispersion. Seen through the grassroots lenses, this study may offer insights into how grassroots governance and innovation inform the (urban) living lab ([U]LL) framework. Unlike conventional ULLs, which are institutionally led and have a network of formal actors, the CK process was shared with, and to some extent led by, local actors, with the university researchers as support and not the lead authority.
In this paper, the authors—one of whom contributed as the embedded researcher at FFG from 2021 to 2023—reflect on the process leading to the creation of the CK toolkit, situated within the FFG grassroots project. The toolkit’s co-production process is an important part of the research design, shaping the research questions, stakeholders engaged and knowledge produced.
3.1 Methods
Fieldwork at FFG (2021–23) used tools from embedded ethnography, combining observational study, critical mapping, semi-structured interviews and active participation in the everyday life and events of FFG. The CK toolkit was co-produced over six months in 2022 through iterative and participatory cycles. Instead of looking at the toolkit as a separate project, it is important to emphasise that the process of embedding within ongoing grassroots spatial practice, as well as the co-production process, was reciprocal and situated in the wider framing of the FFG project. In fact, to operate as embedded researchers, this study required extensive time and emotional labour to situate (Haraway 1988) transparently and ethically. Rendell (2020: 27) defines the verb ‘to situate’ as ‘the action of positioning something in a particular place’ and situatedness as ‘a way of engaging with the qualities of these processes of situating or being situated’. The participation and engagement from this embedded position during the FFG project established a foundation for the development and testing the CK toolkit, making the two phases interconnected. Participatory workshops (Figure 1) formed the backbone of the co-production process of the CK toolkit. Various workshops facilitated are listed below:
Figure 1
Participatory workshops of the Commoning Kirklees (CK) toolkit.
Participatory workshops, where community members identified key needs, challenges and priorities.
Co-design sessions to develop practical guidelines based on case studies and lived experiences of third-sector organisations and grassroots groups.
Feedback workshops to assess the toolkit’s clarity, usability and contextual fit.
Testing workshops, where the toolkit’s contents were trialled and results recorded.
Through these workshops, approximately 20 participants from local, regional, and national grassroots groups and third-sector organisations contributed to the co-production process of the CK toolkit and, more widely, the FFG project. The workshop participants included members of informal citizen groups, collectives, third-sector organisation as well-registered charities. In the FFG there were self-organised and other local grassroots groups such as Huddersfield Repair Café, The Making Space and Highfields Community Orchard. Moreover, there were representatives from regional third-sector organisations, such as Parlour by Parley, Support 2 Recovery, Natural Kirklees, Extinction Rebellion Huddersfield and Culture Declares Emergency Kirklees, and nationally coordinated movements, such as Climate Museum UK, ACAN and Norwich Farm Share. Although not anticipated or measured, participants ranged in age from their 30s to 60s, with a fair gender balance, and brought a wide array of knowledge and experience from diverse backgrounds. The diversity was instrumental in shaping the tone and language of the toolkit as well as in directing its focus on accessibility and shared learning. Section 4 provides further details on the actors involved, specific activities in each workshop, forms of knowledge produced and content generated for the final toolkit.
3.2 Researchers’ position and critical institutional embeddedness
It must be clarified here that the authors did not initiate the FFG project; rather, one author participated as an embedded researcher while the others supported the co-design and dissemination of the CK toolkit. As such, the study itself is not a product of detached observation but situated in the participatory culture of an evolving grassroots practice. The account of the co-production of the CK toolkit will remain incomplete without reflections on the dual role played by the authors, as well as the university’s involvement in the project. Therefore, the research methodology must acknowledge the impossibility of neutral positioning faced in this embedded state as the researcher played roles of fellow volunteer, friend, organiser, facilitator and academic, giving rise to the need for reflexivity (Berger 2015).
At FFG, fieldwork built trust through shared responsibility and emotional labour, but also raised ethical concerns around influence and representation. The skills contributed by academic researchers (i.e. the authors), such as writing, coordination and navigating bureaucracy, were welcomed by the grassroots, but also risked reinforcing hierarchies and ignorance of institutional privilege. The tensions became more evident at the onset of the CK toolkit co-production, which was funded through a participatory funding award to the researchers by the University of Huddersfield. As a result, a structured methodology and research plan approved by the university at the early stages was followed. This tandem between institutional resources and community-driven action brought both opportunities and tensions.
The CK toolkit benefited from institutional infrastructure, such as meeting rooms for workshops, dissemination using institutional platforms, funding to support logistics and also design support. Although affiliated with a university, the project evolved into a community-informed and consulted endeavour, shaped iteratively by its participants and later integrated into the FFG initiative. The researchers took deliberate steps to uphold the project’s core objective of supporting grassroots groups and foregrounding the agency of local actors throughout the co-production process, ensuring that the toolkit reflected the knowledge, needs and authorship of its users, and was shaped by the communities. The open workshops, collective editing and testing attempted to reconfigure a balance and equity in authorship and integrate non-academic forms of knowledge. Academics, designers and facilitators were engaged in support roles rather than as experts and the participants, including those from FFG, were invited to engage with the project as co-producers and later as testers of the toolkit. The process intentionally prioritised themes led by participants, recognising their lived experience as legitimate expertise. It also supported the engagement of a proofreader and graphic designers, helping to produce a toolkit that was accessible and legible to an audience outside of academia. Additionally, all content is copyright-free, allowing other users and researchers to recreate and improve it.
Nonetheless, the institutional framing due to the university’s involvement through funding and the researchers’ participation must be acknowledged, as the role and thus influence of either cannot be disentangled from the process. Although conscious decisions were made to ensure institutional experts did not ‘hijack’ grassroots knowledge and voice by introducing hierarchies of expertise in the co-production process, the academic training and lens did influence how the project was framed, documented and shared. Along with the funding came limitations on the time available for producing deliverables promised in the research application. As a result, there were restrictions on the length of the data collection and testing period and who could engage in its development within the project’s established timeframe and scope. Additionally, a desire to create a ‘transferable’ and ‘useful’ output came from the deep-rooted academic norm around impact and dissemination. The tandem points towards the complexity of university-enabled grassroots innovation, where institutional resources are useful but also steer the bottom-up processes that operate with institutional proximity. The situation reflects a form of critical embeddedness in which academic institutions enable grassroots actions but also risk overtaking its evolution. Acknowledging this tension is key to both the power and limitations of such grassroots-led innovations—it is something that emerges not outside of institutions, but is in tension with and a complex dialogue of resisting its extraction while navigating its structure.
3.3 Limitations and scope
The CK toolkit has two main limitations. First, it has limited transferability. The content is specific to the socio-economic conditions of the Kirklees region of West Yorkshire and, therefore, may not be directly applicable elsewhere. However, the tools were developed with adaptable quality, encouraging other groups to tailor them according to their contexts.
Second, despite efforts to widen participation, some groups were absent during the co-production process. The council was not involved in co-production. However, involvement of third-sector collaborators who work closely with the council helped bridge the gap with formal governance structures.
Some methodological constraints due to the embedded position of the academic actors, which have influenced and shaped the project, were discussed above in Section 3.2.
4. The CK toolkit
The toolkit serves both as a research output and an instrument for research enquiry. The methodology discussed highlighted that its development is conceived as an act of collaboration and as a site for experimentation, negotiation and reflection between various stakeholders. The co-production process is not a separate phase but an integral component that shapes the question being asked, the stakeholders engaged and the forms of knowledge produced.
4.1 Co-production process
The CK toolkit’s development unfolded through four stages, which relied on situated knowledges (Haraway 1988), valuing lived experience alongside distributed expertise. Figure 2 illustrates the four stages of this process, highlighting which actors contributed at each stage. It must also be noted that an effort was made to widen participation by inviting citizens, collectives and grassroots groups from local, regional and national levels. Additionally, the toolkit was further shared with local third-sector organisations and registered community-based organisations, some of whom provided feedback.
Figure 2
Stages of the Commoning Kirklees (CK) project and toolkit formation and testing, with an indication of the key stakeholders involved.
Source: Ahmed & Delsante (2022).
Stage 1: Mapping experiences
A participatory workshop gathered reflections on the experiences of the FFG members. The workshop focused on mapping their motivations, challenges faced, informal knowledge gained and support while reclaiming and managing the site.
Stage 2: Co-design workshop
Participants from local and regional grassroots groups, third-sector organisations and activist groups across Kirklees shared stories, signposted resources and practised methods in two co-design sessions. These workshops acted as collaborative environments where participants collectively critiqued and shared authorship of the emerging tools using knowledge from their lived experiences.
As an intermediate stage, a draft of the toolkit was created by combining findings from stages 1 and 2, which was presented at stage 3.
Stage 3: Widening participation
The first draft was distributed to regional and national grassroots groups and third-sector organisations. In two workshops, one online and another in-person, further feedback was gathered to refine the contents of the toolkit. Along with reflections on the emerging tools, contributors signposted open-access resources (e.g. legal structures, consensus voting mechanisms) that were later added to the toolkit.
Stage 4: Testing and refinement
The final draft version of the toolkit was piloted in give-it-a-go sessions attended by grassroots groups, including FFG. The feedback gathered through testing of the content of the toolkit was then integrated into the final version, which was then circulated in both print and digital formats.
Beyond producing content, the workshops themselves became acts of commoning: moments where decision-making, authorship and accountability were collectively negotiated. These situated practices not only shaped the toolkit but also performed the very ethos of grassroots commoning that the toolkit sought to document and support. All data-collection activities, including workshops, attained ethical clearance following university protocols, and each participant signed informed consent forms before participation.
4.2 Content and use of the toolkit
Topics addressed in the toolkit emerged through collective negotiation in workshops. Early workshop discussions revealed that participants, while motivated, often lacked clear aims, resources and administrative capacity. They expressed the need for practical guidance and accessible tools to navigate bureaucracy and sustain grassroots initiatives—concerns that directly shaped the orientation and content of the CK toolkit. In response, the toolkit took the shape of a school-style workbook: simple to navigate, non-prescriptive and structured around reflective exercises.
The forms of knowledge captured in the toolkit reflected both experiential and technical expertise. From stages 1 and 2, local and regional groups, including FFG members, contributed grounded knowledge regarding initiation of a grassroots project, the resources they used as well as sustaining their practice. More specifically, the findings from stages 1 and 2 guided the toolkit to be divided into four sections: setting up; doing it; growing beyond the first action; and putting in place maintenance tools. Third-sector representatives shared insights about legal structures, safeguarding and funding applications, while regional activist groups brought comparative examples of mobilisation strategies. The feedback from stage 3 was instrumental in revising the toolkit’s structure, enriching its content and shaping its writing style. The feedback highlighted a need for content that is easy to read, visually engaging and follows a modular order or rhythm that tells a story. Criticism on its academic language encouraged a move towards a more colloquial and non-academic writing approach. Participants also expressed that they struggled to read the academic language. With the help of a Yorkshire-based graphics designer and proofreader, the language was then deliberately changed to colloquial and the graphics kept visual with infographics and adaptable formats, to ensure accessibility for groups with different levels of experience. These contributions were collated iteratively, ensuring that both informal know-how and more formalised resources could coexist within a single tool.
The final version of the CK toolkit (Ahmed & Delsante 2022) brought together a range of resources, with three main components: practical templates (e.g. planning agendas, decision-making tools), reflective exercises, and case studies from Kirklees and open-access resources. First, 12 reflective exercises invited groups to clarify their aims, identify challenges and outline achievable action plans, enabling them to generate strategies specific to their own circumstances. Second, open-access resources drawn from both scholarly and practice-based sources provide practical guidance on governance, finance, insurance and other bureaucratic matters frequently encountered by grassroots groups. Third, case studies of established initiatives from Kirklees are included, offering situated examples of how local groups have sustained themselves over time. Together, these elements aimed to balance critical reflection with practical guidance.
4.3 Why yet another toolkit?
Toolkits are widespread in current practice and literature on urban regeneration projects and civic participation. Their value lies in their ability to bridge theory and practice, mobilise communities, and serve as tools to make participation in complex processes accessible (Baibarac & Petrescu 2019). They vary in both methodology and format. For instance, the Tactical Urbanism guide (Lydon & Garcia 2015) provides flexible actions for spatial interventions, while Urban Design Thinking (Dovey 2016) offers conceptual tools for urban design. Other toolkits are designed to address specific issues within communities. For example, the COMENSI toolkit (COMENSI 2020) provides a seven-step method to address low engagement of disadvantaged communities in urban planning processes. Some have taken inclusive approaches to produce toolkits by engaging with end-users through participatory approaches. For example, users of the commoning hub Agrocite engaged in a peer-led ‘learning-through-making’ process to create user guides for digital tools that support collective governance and shared resources. The process enhanced their agency in the production and positioned them as (co)creators who generate value according to their own needs (Baibarac et al. 2019). Similarly, A Community is a Garden toolkit (Anifowoshe & Janower 2020) uses reflective exercises to assist its users to take design and assess their own creative practice.
Innovative methodologies have also incorporated physical and virtual spaces such as co-creation labs in the making of the COMENSI toolkit (COMENSI 2020) as essential engagement mediums for testing and feedback. Toolkits in commons scholarship present easy-to-apply strategies to create and maintain the commons. In Tools to Create Agency, Udall (2015) conceives tools as (co)developed entities that enable the production agencies needed to organise as a community to safeguard and sustain commons resources and engage in commoning processes. Two toolkits focused on urban commons—Urban Commons Cookbook (Dellenbaugh-Losse et al. 2020) and Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons (Shareable 2017)—provide practical understanding and advice using case studies on commons-based solutions to urban issues. Other commons-focused toolkits contribute to a more comprehensive toolbox. Syncity’s Toolbox for Urban Governance in Action (Ivanceanu et al. 2021) contains three parts and offers a step-by-step guide to co-create the urban commons, 11 practical methods for engagement, and 10 self-assessment and development tools. Similarly, the four-part Generative Commons or gE.CO Toolkits (Di Monte & Lenna 2022) cover governance, participation, legality and temporary use to support commons initiatives.
Against this backdrop, the need for the introduction of a new toolkit may be questionable. However, the precedents above also indicate a few directions to expand the body of work on toolkits. The CK toolkit addresses a specific gap: the need for a resource that is locally grounded and methodologically bottom-up, incorporating ground experiences and emerging from experimentation rather than being retrofitted into them.
Unlike many design or tactical toolkits that present transferable checklists or step-by-step manuals, CK was conceived as a situated infrastructure of support. Its resources emerged from lived struggles and experiences in Kirklees. While institutional actors produce many existing toolkits, CK was co-designed with and by active citizens, third-sector representatives, and activist citizens from local, regional and national levels over a six-month iterative process. This resulted in a toolkit with vetted and targeted tools, not only tailored to local socio-political conditions but also shaped by the lived realities of under-represented and under-resourced groups.
Additionally, the final prospect was to create reference lines that guide users through a reflective process. The toolkit only suggests prompts to stimulate proactive thinking, a sense of ownership and collaborative decision-making through peer-to-peer knowledge exchange, rather than prescriptive ‘best-practice’ models. As a result, users have tools to define their agency and decide the direction of their actions. To make the toolkit accessible, the methodology incorporates modular formats, small sections and graphical vocabulary.
By operating outside formal institutional frameworks yet benefiting from institutional support, the CK toolkit can be placed between fully autonomous grassroots outputs and conventional top-down toolkits. It provides a paradigm for other contexts looking to strengthen grassroots capacity by demonstrating how such resources can assist socio-spatial activities rooted in local agency. This approach aligns with the broader goals of ULLs to enable community-led knowledge production and social transformation.
5. Discussion: methodological implications of the toolkit
The previous section highlighted the empirical account of how the toolkit was co-produced, tested and circulated, as well as its content, structure and use. The discussion now turns to its broader implications, specifically reflecting on how this case contributes to the literature of LLs and grassroots-led innovation. The CK toolkit is not one more instance of community engagement but is a methodological experiment that challenges the institutional framework of conventional LLs, highlights the importance of grassroots’ epistemic value, and reveals the dynamics of operating between community and university.
5.1 A grassroots perspective
The CK toolkit demonstrated that grassroots perspectives can inform the scope of the LL model by repositioning experimentation within everyday activism by citizens. Much of the LL scholarship emphasises institution-led models, where universities, councils or corporations are the main initiators. They emphasise formal partnerships and centralised decision-making, and the presence of multiple institutional actors. While such models do generate insights on collaboration between the various stakeholders involved, they risk being defined and driven by institutional objectives. By contrast, the CK toolkit showed how tool-making and co-production can be driven by and emerge from priorities, lived experiences and practices of grassroots groups, and where experimentation is not driven by formal partnerships. Similar examples include intentional communities such as Svartlamon in Norway, which prioritise local agency over bureaucratic hierarchies (Piziak et al. 2023).
Additionally, the process of tool-making acted as a form of collaborative enquiry. Instead of acting as an external deliverable, the workshops became sites of knowledge co-production, positioning CK as a support device for the community and also as a methodology where groups and researchers co-curate practical tools. Thus, the case exemplified a methodological reorientation that is not grounded in institutional test beds for technology or policy development, but as socially embedded, messy and experimental practices that generate new forms of agency and make invisible labour visible.
5.2 Critical institutional embeddedness
The role of the researchers and, therefore, the university added a new dynamic to the CK process. While the forest garden project predated the academic involvement, the toolkit was supported by funding from the University of Huddersfield. Institutional support benefitted the project by covering costs and offering spaces for collaboration. At the same time, these resources also shaped the deliverables to produce an impactful output within a strict timeline. The dynamic can be seen as a form of critical institutional embeddedness—a position in which institutional support enables grassroots action but also risks stirring it. In this case, the researchers negotiated the dual and often blurry boundary of being a facilitator, academic and participant, building trust while navigating ethical dilemmas around power relations and influence. While care was taken to ensure participant-led themes and treat grassroots groups as equal experts, the academic involvement did influence how the project was steered, documented and disseminated.
In terms of LL scholarship, this dynamic foregrounds a need for reflexivity where it is important to acknowledge the entanglements not as a weakness but as a critical condition. Instead of operating outside or detached from institutions, GLLs may often benefit from being in constant dialogue with institutions. It also gives attention to a gap faced by informal groups: how resources, legitimacy and knowledge circulate between the formal–informal domain. The CK methodology thus frames grassroots-led innovation as a situated one, shaped by active citizens but also in dialogue with the institutions, rather than an autonomous one.
5.3 Tool-making as a collaborative device
The CK case contributes to a methodological innovation by expanding how toolkits are conceived and used. In contrast to toolkits made by professionals or institutional actors for community use, the CK toolkit differs by embedding grassroots actors in the centre of the co-production process from inception, honing in on their lived experience as the main source of situated knowledge. The process propels tool-making as a collaborative device—a platform which brings diverse actors together to negotiate challenges, share strategies and reflect collectively.
For LL research, this has three methodological implications:
Toolkits can act as research instruments: probing enquiry and producing practical resources simultaneously.
Toolkits open to situated adaptability: rooted in local experiences but open for adaptations in other contexts.
Tool-making as a capacity-building mechanism: fosters confidence and collective agency, not imposing ‘how-to’ measures from top-down.
Other grassroots-led labs have demonstrated similar virtues where the focus shifts from product development to collective capacity-building and radical social transformation. Examples include decentralised resource-sharing systems that challenge mainstream socio-economic structures (von Wirth et al. 2019) or youth-led obesity prevention labs (Tsekleves et al. 2024). CK adds to the trajectory of grassroots-led labs where methodological tools are generated which are reflective and practical.
5.4 Towards grassroots-led living labs (GLLs)
The reflections above point towards the need for an expansion of the LL framework to also account for forms of experimentation that are civic-led but also in dialogue with institutional frameworks. The CK case contends that GLLs are merely smaller or alternative versions of the conventional LL models. Rather, they represent a distinct epistemological positioning where innovation is a product of situated and collaborative actions, outputs are instruments for reflection and action, and the final aim is social change rather than product optimisation or policy development.
Unlike conventional ULLs, which often emphasise technological solutions, formal partnerships and service improvement, GLLs prioritise everyday experimentation, informal governance and the messy but generative processes of commoning. They challenge dominant institutionalised conceptualisations of LLs by foregrounding autonomy, care and collective learning. This aligns with recent arguments that grassroots innovation should be understood as infrastructures of solidarity, sustainability and urban resilience (Baibarac & Petrescu 2019; Belfield & Petrescu 2024; Seyfang & Smith 2007).
More broadly, CK presents a methodological innovation towards a GLL approach where urban experimentation acknowledges and is strengthened by situated knowledge, invisible labour and commoning ethos. By embracing grassroots perspectives, the LL scholarship can be better informed by the value and nuances of informal practices and the transformative zeal of community-led innovation.
6. Conclusions
This paper analysed the co-production of the Commoning Kirklees (CK) toolkit as part of the grassroots-led activist project Fartown Forest Garden (FFG) and attempted to connect it with the ongoing discourse about living labs (LLs). The paper contributes to the LL literature by advancing a methodological perspective that emphasises grassroots knowledge, co-production methods, and critical dynamics shared between institutions and communities, and it provides a practice-based framework for rethinking citizen-led/engaged innovation.
The study demonstrates how grassroots knowledge, embedded research positioning, and co-production of tools can inform the methods and practices of LLs. This approach aligns with broader definitions of LLs as user-centred, open innovation ecosystems, but challenges the dominant institutionalised conceptualisation by highlighting the potential of locally embedded, bottom-up experimentation. The bottom-up approach discussed illustrates a collaborative action between citizens and researchers to produce resources that are not only situated and practical but also innovative in their emphasis on spatial and social justice.
The paper foregrounds the CK toolkit as a methodological probe that mobilises local knowledge, strengthens collective agency and supports informal groups in sustaining their bottom-up practices as well as navigating bureaucratic barriers. It informs the LL literature by offering insights into a practice-based approach of grassroots-led experimentation where knowledge is collectively produced and situated rather than institutionally defined. Simultaneously, the study also reveals tensions of institutional embeddedness, where institutional support is crucial for resources but also poses great influence over the trajectory of the project. Acknowledgement of this tension is important to learn about the limitations and scopes of grassroots and university partnerships.
The case shows how toolkits can serve as platforms for mediation for collective experimentation in other contexts as well. Although the CK toolkit is rooted in the context and experiences of Kirklees, the methodology and tools created are adaptable, open-access and grounded in the lived experience of the participants. This hints that LLs informed or led by grassroots perspectives are not merely local exceptions but can serve as a distinct epistemological stance within the LL research field, foregrounding bottom-up governance and local agency. Similarly, Belfield & Petrescu (2024) underline the importance of neighbourhood sharing and commoning practices as counterpoints to overly structured innovation ecosystems, revealing how co-design in grassroots contexts can foster urban resilience and social solidarity. These approaches are not merely localised experiments but are increasingly recognised as alternative infrastructures of care, solidarity and sustainability (Baibarac & Petrescu 2019; Seyfang & Smith 2007).
For researchers, it demonstrates a reflexive embedded methodology that critically questions positions, power relations and authorship. For policymakers, such toolkits create a bridge between informal groups and formal structures, but only if local agency and knowledge are valued as expertise. For the grassroots, CK serves as an example of how collective labour and lived experience on the ground can be translated into practical resources which, in turn, can support others in navigating the complexities of bureaucracy as well as sustain bottom-up agency. Since its completion, printed copies of the CK toolkit have been widely circulated among grassroots groups, local charities and third-sector organisations in Kirklees. Moreover, the project was presented at international workshops and conferences to gather feedback from academic peers, activists and practitioners. The toolkit has been used as part of early-stage gatherings by some new initiatives looking to manage or creatively use small community spaces in Huddersfield. In the absence of formal channels of monitoring, informal feedback shows there is a positive response towards the open-access format, reflective process, local stories and graphical language, especially for early-stage collectives. It must also be noted that the workshops facilitated during this project created a network among its participants, strengthening local connections and furthering creative collaborations. The approach highlighted here invites further reflections on how the LL framework can engage with grassroots knowledge more meaningfully. This includes future research potential for comparative studies of grassroots-led labs in other geographical, cultural or institutional contexts, as well as testing the toolkit in other contexts. A deeper investigation of the dynamics between the institutions and communities is also needed. Moreover, studies on the normalisation of grassroots innovation (Roysen & Mertens 2019) and place-based activism (van den Nouwelant 2019) can further reinforce the potential of such approaches to recalibrate power dynamics, reconfigure social practices and build enduring frameworks for participatory urbanism beyond the laboratory setting. Finally, this study is grounded in a European context and, therefore, has been shaped by the socio-political context specific to the UK. Future research can expand on this limitation by exploring how such grassroots-led methodologies unfold in the Global South.
The CK toolkit suggests a starting point towards more grounded and democratic approaches to citizen-led innovations to encompass small-scale, self-organised, and community-engaged platforms initiated and led by civic actors who collectivise and experiment with new alternatives to foster social and environmental change. This expanded framing of ULLs aligns with the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) et al.’s (2025) definition of user-centred, open innovation ecosystems, yet challenges the prevailing institutionalised understanding of ULLs by showcasing the potential of locally embedded, bottom-up experimentation.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the members of Fartown Forest Garden community and all other participants involved in the Commoning Kirklees project for their time, knowledge and sustained involvement. They also acknowledge the University of Huddersfield for financial support through a participatory research grant and logistics support, which enabled the development of the project.
Competing interests
The authors have no competing interests to declare.
Data accessibility
The data are not publicly available due to ethical considerations and the need to protect the anonymity of participants. Summarised or anonymised materials (e.g. workshop notes, toolkit drafts) may be available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. The Commoning Kirklees Toolkit, produced through this research, is publicly available at: https://pure.hud.ac.uk/ws/files/52382847/Commoning_Kirklees_Ahmed_Delsante_2022.pdf.
Ethical approval
All research activities were conducted in accordance with the ethical guidelines of the University of Huddersfield. Ethical approval was obtained before the study, and informed consent was secured from all participants.