About
Our approach
UBC's Campus as a Living Lab (CLL) provides a collaborative framework for faculty, staff, students and partners to address urgent global sustainability challenges. We seek to increase UBC’s collective impact by scaling up projects, enhancing knowledge exchange, and catalyzing effective policy influence and action as an agent of change.
Managed by the Sustainability Hub, CLL supports integration and collaboration among people from different disciplines across the university, along with local, regional and global partners, and enables the sharing of knowledge and experiences. CLL uses campus infrastructure, assets and resources to support applied research projects that have an operational benefit for the university, advance faculty research agendas, and create opportunities for student learning and knowledge exchanges.
Vision
We aspire to be a globally-impactful hub for living lab research, demonstration, learning and knowledge exchange that helps address the world’s most urgent sustainability challenges.
Purpose
As a leading public research university, we have a commitment and responsibility to leverage our academic and operational capabilities to respond to global problems through our local context.
Mission
We provide a collaborative framework for researchers, students, operations staff and external partners to leverage the campus to explore, develop and test new ideas, and to share the knowledge gained from these experiences.
Our values
Our work is guided by a set of core values, in addition to the values laid out in UBC’s Strategic Plan, Shaping the Next Century.
1. Sustainability
We support and develop projects that contribute to ecological, social and economic sustainability, address the climate and biodiversity crises, and are aligned with the long-term strategic vision for the UBC campus and its community.
2. Equity and Inclusion
We embed justice, equity, diversity and inclusion in all our projects and in our engagement with UBC community members and external partners.
3. Transparency
We build collaborations and partnerships through clear and open processes, and ensuring fair, ethical, consensual and transparent engagement.
4. Collaborative Learning
We embrace participatory and reciprocal ways of learning and sharing knowledge, reflective of the different communities, knowledge systems and experiences of those engaged in our projects.
History: The evolution of Campus as a Living Lab
For nearly 20 years, UBC’s Campus as a Living Lab (CLL) has been a cornerstone of innovation and applied research, evolving into a dynamic framework for addressing global sustainability challenges. The living lab projects at UBC have taken various forms: large capital projects that demonstrate first-of-a-kind ideas, such as the Brock Commons Tallwood Residence and the Bioenergy Research and Demonstration Facility, research-industry partnerships piloting innovative technologies, and the integration of research and learning with operational priorities. Recently funding competitions at both the Vancouver and Okanagan campuses have been launched to provide seed funding for new projects and collaborations.
Managed by the Urban Innovation Research team within UBC’s Sustainability Hub, CLL platform is building new programs and resources to advance and expand living lab projects and collaborations across UBC academics and operations, and to share experiences and learning within and beyond our campuses. Our goal is to increase the real-world impact of diverse living lab projects, accelerating progress in sustainability policies and practices locally, regionally and globally.
