BELLAB — Belgrade's First Urban Living Lab for Climate-Resilient Co-Creation

BELLAB (Beogradska živa urbana laboratorija) is the first Urban Living Lab in Serbia and the Western Balkans, hosted by the Centre for Experiments and Urban Studies (CEUS) together with the City of Belgrade's Secretariat for Environmental Protection. It grew out of the EU Horizon 2020 project CLEVER Cities, which set up nature-based urban regeneration blueprints in three pilot cities (Hamburg, London, Milan) and replication roadmaps in five further cities including Belgrade.

Between December 2019 and March 2020 the newly founded partnership ran citizen surveys, focus groups and a young-architects competition to co-design a Linear Park along a disused railway corridor in the Dorćol district, envisaged as a multifunctional eco-technological, artistic and educational demonstration site. The lab has since broadened into an AI-supported co-creation platform (AI-BELLAB) covering climate adaptation, air and soil pollution, biodiversity and mobility.

On 19 November 2019 the lab convened almost 60 participants from more than 35 local and national institutions — public bodies, private firms, academia and civil society — to found a formal Partnership for Urban Innovation, ratified by mayoral decision on 27 November 2019. As a CLEVER Cities 'roadmap' city rather than one of the three full pilot cities, Belgrade's evidence base to date is process-level — attendance, institutional buy-in and a co-created design vision — rather than measured environmental or social outcomes; the Linear Park's construction and post-occupancy results are not yet independently documented.

BELLAB offers a replicable partnership template — formal municipal ratification, cross-sector membership and a public engagement calendar — that other secondary cities in the region could adapt even without dedicated EU pilot-city funding.