Framing urban living lab as a multi-dimensional knowledge model: Experiences from Shenzhen Overseas Chinese Town Wetland Park

Abstract

Chinese

Urban living labs (ULLs) have an experimental and transformative approach towards urban sustainability. Engaging with existing literature on two fields of research in which ULLs figure prominently, namely environmental governance and sustainability transition, this article rethinks hierarchical and institutional perspectives of ULL knowledge co-production that highlight the upscaling of policy models and institutions to achieve social relevance and efficacy. In contrast, this study highlights individual participants who join the ULL incidentally and voluntarily, as well as their embodied and lived knowledge produced in situ in forms of cognitive and behavioural changes. By unfolding the opinions and actions of visitors and volunteers involved in the Shenzhen Overseas Chinese Town Wetland Park, this article reframes ULLs as multi-dimensional knowledge models consisting of multi-actors and plural forms of knowledge.

Keywords

environmental governance lived knowledge non-scalability sustainability experiment urban living lab

Introduction

As a distinct form of sustainability experimentation, urban living labs (ULLs) have attracted widespread interest over the past two decades (Bulkeley et al., 2019). By definition, ULLs are local places ‘for innovative solutions that aim to solve urban challenges and contribute to long-term sustainability by actively and openly co-constructing solutions with citizens and other stakeholders’ (Chronéer et al., 2019: 60). In the pursuit of urban sustainability, ULLs facilitate public participation and cooperation, empower citizens and promote knowledge co-production (Sachs Olsen and van Hulst, 2024). Moving beyond the binary between fields and laboratories, which was characteristic of earlier forms of urban experiments, ULLs provide an inclusive approach, signposting major features such as knowledge co-production and real-world settings, mobilising broader participation and envisioning collective futures (Gieryn, 2006). Thus far, ULLs have been mobilised to an increasing extent to realise social–environmental goals, mainly in the two overlapping fields of environmental governance and sustainability transition (Ehnert, 2022).

Specifically, studies on environmental governance through ULLs focus on the ecological consequences of administrative or institutional arrangements (Bridge and Perreault, 2009; Ehnert, 2022). Drawing on the ULL concept, traditional ‘policy experiments’ are replaced by ‘experimental governance’ for policy-makers to include a broad range of public bodies in co-production and cultivate new institutions for governing urban sustainability (Voytenko et al., 2016). As such, the underlying interests of, and hence contestations between, diverse actors constitute the core of the inquiry (Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2013). Alternatively, ULLs may engage with the goal of sustainability transition to envision fundamental and systematic changes, which help with ‘navigating, negotiating and (ideally) reducing uncertainty about new socio-technical innovations’ (Geels and Kemp, 2007; von Wirth et al., 2019: 231). In these processes, the multi-level perspective (MLP) is often adopted to highlight the local–global scaling of co-produced knowledge (Genus and Coles, 2008). It consists of three scales of institutions – the niche, the regime and the landscape, referring to experimental space at the micro scale, institutional arrangements at the meso scale and broader contextual conditions at the macro scale, respectively – through which the innovation realises cross-scale transmission (Geels, 2005).

Trying to further nuance these studies, this article argues that knowledge co-production in ULLs needs to be rethought in two ways. On the one hand, most existing works on ULLs are dominated by hierarchical frameworks centred on administrative or geographical scales, as well as institutional actors with top-down political and/or economic agendas (Ehnert, 2022; McLean et al., 2016). These frameworks conceive of ULLs in terms of multi-scalar and often top-down approaches, serving as pathways to systematic governance and transition (Kern, 2019; Voytenko et al., 2016). Though studies on ULLs have already shed light on non-government actors, such as non-profit organisations and communities (Bulkeley et al., 2019; Fuenfschilling et al., 2019), ordinary individual participants and their situated experiences in ULLs still tend to elide attention. However, it has been revealed that individual participants play active roles in shaping experimental results and the diffusion of knowledge through their diverse capacities and positionalities (Bögel et al., 2019; Brown and Vergragt, 2008). Yet, these processes remain to be further explored and theorised.

On the other hand, in the existing literature the knowledge co-produced in ULLs is usually distilled and crystallised into policy models or socio-technical innovations (Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2013; Evans, 2016), whose values lie in their ‘scalability’ (Tsing, 2012, 2015), namely the potential of travelling beyond the immediate context and being applied elsewhere (Evans and Karvonen, 2011, 2014). While the embeddedness of ULLs in real-world contexts is repeatedly emphasised, the lived knowledge based on the in situ, embodied and lived experiences and practices of individual participants is seldom theorised, especially how its ‘non-scalability’ co-constitutes, conditions or constrains the efficacy and utility of knowledge models (Frantzeskaki et al., 2018; Tsing, 2012). For instance, it has been argued that the value of lived knowledge comes from its ‘adherence to life as it is really lived’, based on which it is useful and transformative (Evans and Karvonen, 2014; Kohler, 2002: 215). However, the social dynamics and practices set in motion to achieve this transformation and the relationships between scalable and non-scalable aspects of ULLs invite more nuanced investigation.

To delve into these points, this article develops a case study of the Overseas Chinese Town Wetland Park (OCT Park) in Shenzhen, China, as a key ULL expected to experiment with and ultimately cultivate human–nature bonding and pro-environmental awareness vis-à-vis rapid urbanisation. Located on the north coast of Shenzhen Bay, the park was established on a barren beach left over from land reclamation during Shenzhen’s expansion in the 1990s (Figure 1a). In 2007, to improve the deteriorating environment and explore new ways to socialise citizens into pro-environmental mentalities and behaviours, the Shenzhen Municipal Government entrusted this tidal flat to OCT Group, a mega state-owned enterprise specialising in cultural tourism, for wetland ecological restoration and subsequent open operation. After a five-year ecological restoration, the wetland was opened to the public for free on a limited basis, becoming the first public wetland park in Shenzhen and the only wetland park located in the centre of a mega-city in China. It occupies an area of 685,000 m², including more than 500,000 m² of water and 50,000 m² of mangrove forest (Figure 1b). In 2014, the first Nature School in Shenzhen was established in OCT Park, aiming to facilitate visitors’ embodied experiences in nature and thus cultivate environmental awareness and behaviours. In sum, OCT Park provides a real-world context for diverse actors to collectively experiment with the ways in which various forms of environmental knowledge are produced, hence constituting an ideal case of ULL.

Figure 1.

OCT Wetland Park: (a) park location map and (b) park navigation map.

To elaborate on the generation of lived experimental knowledge and its implications for the promotion of urban sustainability, this article, after briefly delineating the ways in which institutional actors participate in the making and replication of knowledge models, focuses on two types of individual actors, namely visitors and volunteers. Compared with institutional actors who abstract experiment outputs into management strategies and policy models that can be rescaled and applied in other contexts, individual participants join the initiative voluntarily, acquire lived knowledge and practise it through cognitive and behavioural changes in everyday life. As such, we frame ULLs as a multi-dimensional knowledge model whose contribution to urban sustainability is more multi-faceted and multi-dimensional than what a hierarchical perspective underscores, that is, transferability between an immediate context and broader scales through institutions and social–technical arrangements (Fuenfschilling et al., 2019). We argue that the production of embodied and lived knowledge, which is largely non-scalable, and its diffusion through everyday lives and networks, co-constitutes the efficacy of sustainability experiments and how the transformative goals of ULLs are realised.

The analytical lens we champion above enriches scholarly understandings about knowledge production in ULLs because it saves from a terra incognita the lived, experiential knowledge that cannot be disembedded from its place-based context, scaled up through hierarchies and implemented in alternative contexts without much friction and uncertainty (Tsing, 2012). Indeed, even though policy models can be rendered mobile, the efficacy of the experiment may not be readily replicated, given the non-scalable elements of ULLs, which involve situated practices, embodied conduct and the performativity of environmental subjectivities in prosaic life. As such, ULLs cannot be evaluated simply based on the transferability of policy models and socio-technical pathways, but should also be evaluated based on individual participants’ practices, cognitions and self-invention. From another perspective, the scalability and non-scalability of experimental knowledge are mutually complementary because mobile policy models depend on situated routines and impromptu practices to deliver their efficacy across different places. Entangled, the two dimensions co-constitute the potential for ULLs to trigger the transition towards urban sustainability.

ULLs: Co-producing knowledge in real-world contexts

Knowledge co-production and real-world settings are two distinct characteristics of ULLs that differentiate them from traditional urban experiments (Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2013). On the one hand, ULLs bring together stakeholders with varying objectives and produce knowledge ‘addressing specific urban problems or improving the urban condition more generally’ (Evans, 2016: 437). ULLs provide spaces for actors with diverse interests to explore and understand the existing situation whilst crystallising a specific vision for the future (Bulkeley et al., 2019; Evans et al., 2015). By studying the interactions and conflicts between varied actors, the underlying visions, ideologies and imaginaries that determine the direction of ULLs are revealed (Karvonen et al., 2014). On the other hand, ULLs transform everyday contexts into experimental spaces, allowing different participants to immerse in innovation processes and obtain knowledge that can be easily applied to their lives – namely, a ‘seeing is believing’ heuristic (Brons et al., 2022; Evans et al., 2018). Real-world settings provide an easily accessible lens to observe how diverse stakeholders design, test and learn to understand how cities change and evolve (Karvonen, 2018; von Wirth et al., 2019). In this vein, ULLs identify interventions to ‘inspire rapid social and technical transformation’ that has relevance beyond the remit of the experiment per se (Evans and Karvonen, 2011: 126), which is the source of ULLs’ credibility and legitimisation (Gieryn, 2006; Kern, 2019).

In line with these two qualities, the heuristics of ULLs have been applied to different fields of urban sustainability research, especially at the nexus of environmental governance and sustainability transition. In all, knowledge co-production can be conceptualised based on the dual processes of ‘making’ and ‘learning’ (Evans, 2016; Puerari et al., 2018). In terms of knowledge making, i.e. the process of generating innovative products, services or processes, existing literature mainly considers innovations in policies and institutional arrangements as the cornerstone outputs of ULLs (Karvonen and van Heur, 2014). Specifically, environmental governance studies regard ULLs as innovative ways to coordinate the needs and resources of various stakeholders and impose administrative authority for tackling environmental issues (Boyd and Juhola, 2015; Lemos and Agrawal, 2006). Similarly, sustainability transition focuses particularly on initiatives and efforts to facilitate the institutional arrangements necessary for nurturing socio-technical innovations and promoting systematic transitions (Chini et al., 2017). Experimental results are abstracted and disembedded from the immediate contexts of ULLs, for example universities and science parks, in the form of scalable institutional models that await being enforced elsewhere (Evans and Karvonen, 2014; Karvonen et al., 2014).

For both scenarios, the corresponding processes of learning, that is, the process of diffusing and mobilising produced knowledge, technologies and practices beyond their original contexts, rely on hierarchical arrangements or processes (Bulkeley et al., 2014; von Wirth et al., 2019). For instance, environmental governance tends to work with a vertical logic, relying on top-down hierarchies that regard small-scale experiments as the pathways towards governance innovation (Ehnert, 2022; Healey, 2004). The multiple tiers and spheres of governance with intermediates between them are of central importance for policy models to be upscaled from place-based individual projects to universalised arrangements that can be adopted in different places and over time (Kern, 2019). Comparatively, knowledge learning in transition studies is often scrutinised from a multi-level perspective comprising three levels of socio-technical systems (Geels, 2010). Specifically, niches are microscale loci where innovations are generated (e.g. pilot areas), regimes are mesoscale realms where ‘research and policy interact and react’ (e.g. specific institutions) and landscape provides the exogenous macroscale environment as the cornerstone of changes (e.g. globalisation) (Chini et al., 2017: 2; Geels, 2005). To realise transition, ULLs function as real-life niches, which are expected to become part of the regime configuration and to ultimately reshape the contour of the landscape (Geels, 2005; von Wirth et al., 2019).

However, the existing literature on knowledge co-production in ULLs casts inadequate light on the plural pathways towards the production of knowledge. Firstly, although the focus of ULLs studies has shifted from policy-makers to a broad range of public actors (Evans et al., 2015; Puerari et al., 2018), attention still tends to be confined to institutional actors that are hierarchically anchored (Bulkeley et al., 2014). This analytical lens risks a simplified portrayal of the experiments and oversight of the individual participants, who are not simply co-opted by the design of experiment but actively negotiate the parameters set up by ULLs and constantly renew their understandings (Sachs Olsen and van Hulst, 2024; Verlinghieri et al., 2024). The ‘urban learning forum’ proposed by McFarlane (2011: 369) comprises ‘the state, donors, non-governmental organisations, local groups, researchers and activists’, yet puts aside individual participants. Also, while many cities have carried out citizen-orientated ULLs to stimulate public participation (Chang et al., 2021; Jones et al., 2019), many projects are argued to be ‘“dropped in” urban areas from above’ rather than evolving with citizens, and only align with the needs of select groups (McLean et al., 2016: 3248). As such, the diverse voices, perspectives and competencies of individual participants constitute a realm of enquiry that awaits unpacking (Bögel et al., 2019; Brown and Vergragt, 2008). By emphasising the individual participants, a lopsided emphasis on hierarchical structures is superseded and rethought by attention to more decentred and participatory co-production (Höflehner and Zimmermann, 2018).

Secondly, a multi-dimensional knowledge model also emphasises plural forms of knowledge. Despite the call for networked and more inclusive learning processes (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2005), investigation of the knowledge output of ULLs still leans on the technological solutions embedded in institutional structures of enterprises and governments (Bulkeley et al., 2014). Although some ULLs highlight that the citizenry offers alternative insights and knowledge other than policy and niche innovation, they are still centred on stylised knowledge models, which cannot account for the full range of heterogeneity, uncertainty and non-linearity of the dynamics in real-world contexts (Boyd and Juhola, 2015; McLean et al., 2016). As such, participants’ lived experiences, which are situated, fluid and personalised, but simultaneously shaped by the deliberate designs of ULLs, need further scrutiny (Brons et al., 2022; Evans et al., 2021). It has indeed been revealed that lived experiences, if integrated into co-produced experimental knowledge, lead to better adaptability and success rates when applied elsewhere (Evans et al., 2016). As Evans and Karvonen (2011) explain, these ‘living practices’ at the human scale can be better positioned between technological possibilities and in situ contexts, as they permeate into the re-making of people’s consciousness and conduct. Lived knowledge, meanwhile, can be transferred to a broader range of banal realms through ‘mobile lives and mundane practices’ (Karvonen, 2018; Sengers and Raven, 2015: 170; van den Bosch, 2010).

Ultimately, the discussions so far point to the need to give more heed to the non-scalability of knowledge in ULLs. As Davidson et al. (2019) criticise, current research on ULLs suffers from insufficient theorisation and empirical investigation of complicated spatialities, falling into ‘scalar envelopes’ that oversimplify knowledge creation and diffusion as linear and uni-dimensional. Also, Karvonen (2018: 202) questions the mission of experimental governance while asking, ‘What if urban experiments did not scale up?’ the non-scalability of lived knowledge co-produced in ULLs provides a potential and tentative response to this question. Non-scalable experimental knowledge, on the one hand, co-evolves with scalable policies, models and institutions, while, on the other hand, making scalability indeterminate and contingent in itself because to deliver the utility of policies and institutions depends on their articulation with situated and lived contexts and practices. In Tsing’s (2012: 505) discussions on non-scalability, she criticised the endless pursuit of scalability as ‘a triumph of precision design’, ignoring the heterogeneity and indeterminacy in the real world. Even if scalability seems to constitute a separate domain from non-scaled contingencies, it ‘uses articulations with non-scalable forms’ (Tsing, 2012: 506). As such, this study takes seriously the lived experiences of ULLs as a quintessential source of knowledge, embedded and practised within the textures of local institutions, sociocultural contexts and situated practices.

Methods

Empirical data in support of this study came from two sources: first-hand fieldwork and second-hand archival materials. A total of 45 days of fieldwork were conducted between May 2019 and November 2020, with one follow-up visit conducted in April 2023 (the interval was primarily due to travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic). Participatory observations and semi-structured interviews were used as the primary methods. We entered the park as volunteers and visitors to have first-hand exposure to the park and get familiar with a broad range of activities, including random tours, guided tours, interactive activities and nature education. Subsequently, 46 interviews were conducted, covering managerial staff, technical staff, senior managers, visitors, residents nearby, experts and volunteers. In line with the park’s management structure, the staff interviewed came from the operation, natural education, ecology foundation, administrative and volunteer departments. Each interview lasted between 30 and 60 minutes. In total, 240,000 words of audio transcripts, 26,000 words of field research notes and about 600 photos were collected during fieldwork. In addition, we extensively collected second-hand data on OCT Park, especially information about its trusteeship, planning, management and milestone events. This body of data mainly comprises open-source materials such as working documents, government policies, media coverage, park brochures, etc. in conjunction with non-public internal circulars, including city planning documents, park regulations, work manuals, etc.

In all, the information collected from interviews, participatory observations and second-hand archives casts light on the following aspects of OCT Park: its development path, its relationship with OCT Group and the local state, its daily operation, the activities organised by the park, the design and implementation of nature education, the embodied experiences of participants and finally, their perceptions, affective feelings and development of eco-awareness. The collected materials were qualitatively analysed mainly through the three-class coding methods. In the open-coding stage, we added generative codes to the materials through line-by-line reading, capturing phrases, lexicons and sentences describing opinions, attitudes and concepts invoked by interviewees and the respective roles played by them. Afterwards, in the axial coding stage, coded information was grouped into broader categories and themes. The generative codes were interpreted comparatively, and the dynamics, processes and characteristics of knowledge co-production for different actors were revealed. Finally, in the selective coding stage, the knowledge co-production processes of different actors were further distilled and summarised into two categories, namely scalable knowledge and non-scalable knowledge, and framed into the multi-dimensional knowledge model that also takes shape in tandem with data analysis. This study has a particular emphasis on non-scalable knowledge, especially how different actors produce lived knowledge through embodied contact with nature, and how lived knowledge translates into the awareness, subjectivities and norms regulating people’s prosaic conduct vis-a-vis the environment and nature.

OCT Park: A ULL with a multi-dimensional knowledge model

Institutional actors: Shenzhen government and OCT Group

In 2007, to improve the deteriorating ecological conditions of Shenzhen Bay, the Shenzhen government entrusted the conservation of the tidal flat to OCT Group for 40 years as a pre-condition for obtaining the development rights of the mega commercial complex named OCT Harbour next to the wetland. Unlike the closed management of most natural reserves or the commercialisation of sites of environmental amenities in China, OCT Park adopts an eclectic approach – it only opens from 9:30 to 17:00, and closes every Monday and Wednesday except for public holidays. Considering the limit to carrying capacity, it only admits 400 visitors daily in the non-migratory season for birds (May to October) and 300 in the migratory season. Besides, only the 2.5 km trail and the exhibition hall north of the wetland are open to visitors.

Through this model, the Shenzhen government harvests innovation in environmental governance, addressing the need to repair a deteriorated environment as the legacy of rapid urbanisation. As most Chinese nature reserves are under the jurisdiction of government agencies, OCT Park was the first urban natural reserve to adopt the ‘government leadership, enterprise management and public participation’ model. The government sets the goal of ecological restoration for OCT Wetland and develops policies at the municipal level to promote the development of wetlands, while OCT Group is responsible for formulating restoration plans and performing daily operations. In this way, the burden of environmental governance and ecological restoration is externalised to a non-government actor, and OCT Group receives incentives such as development rights, financial support and an image as a socially responsible corporate actor. This model has been proven to be compelling, receiving a series of awards and affirmations, such as the ‘National Eco-tourism Demonstration Area’, ‘China Habitat Scroll of Honor Award’, etc. At COP 14 of the UN Ramsar Convention on Wetlands in 2022, OCT Park was selected as one of three outstanding cases of wetland education in China.

Moreover, the government won a reputation in line with its political objectives. As a response to the mandate of the central state for ecological civilisation construction (ECC) in the report of the 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the Shenzhen government released the Action Program for ECC of Shenzhen in 2008. In this context, the establishment and development of OCT Wetland were intertwined with Shenzhen’s striving towards being a pioneering sustainable city. In 2012, after ECC was officially included in the national agenda at the 18th National Congress of the CCP, the Shenzhen government also set the goal of building a ‘Beautiful Shenzhen’, aiming at the creation of a policy model for national demonstration. In the same year, OCT Park opened to the public. In 2016, Shenzhen launched its plan to establish a ‘world-class forest city’ that matched its craved status as a modern, international and innovative city. Subsequently, OCT Park began to serve this plan and was designated as a municipal wetland park, which was ultimately upgraded to one of the first national wetland parks. As a pilot case, the success of OCT Park was recognised and abstracted as a transferrable model to be replicated in other cities. In this regard, OCT Park acts as a showcase for Shenzhen to display its ECC achievements to the outside world: ‘It serves as a microcosm of the city’s development and an external showcase. During the legislation of the Guangdong Wetland Protection Regulations and the National Wetland Protection Regulations, we were the only representative of wetland parks’ (Interviewee 7, chief operation director).

In parallel, OCT Group used OCT Park to demonstrate its commitment to corporate social responsibility and experiment with new business models. For one thing, as a mega central-state-owned enterprise based in Shenzhen with a diverse commercial portfolio, the group was considered obligated by the state to make contributions to improving the environment and promoting citizens’ quality of life. Taking over the wetland and spending 200 million yuan to carry out ecological restoration projects, OCT Group’s creation of OCT Park is regarded as a vivid case of a government-owned enterprise fulfilling social responsibility. In the publicity work of the group, the case is repeatedly mentioned in its web pages, advertisements and media reports to highlight the group’s leading position in aligning with national policies and its exploration of ameliorating the urban environment. Besides, OCT Group also initiated the OCT Hua Ecological Protection Foundation in 2013, serving as a specialised organ of the group for providing public interests and amenities with regard to the environment. Based on OCT Wetland, the foundation has gradually stepped out of the remit of the park and initiated forums, education projects and community experiments to expand its social impact.

OCT Group has also trialled a new ‘best practice’ of integrating urban nature into commercial complexes, utilising the wetland’s attraction to visitors to generate revenue for tourism and leisure mega-structures in close proximity. Specifically, the expenses of OCT Park come from the revenue of OCT Harbour. Meanwhile, in the promotion of OCT Harbour, the wetland is imagined as a unique selling point to attract tourists and nature lovers. The alignment of OCT Park with the surrounding shopping malls, holiday apartments and amusement facilities, for example Happy Valley and Splendid China, adds to tourists’ motivation to consume. Consequently, it formalised a highly profitable ‘Conservation + Business’ model, which has been replicated in other cities – for example, in 2018, OCT Group successfully bid for the development right of state-owned land covering an area of about 184,000 m² in Shunde, Guangdong Province, with 132 million RMB, planning to replicate the model of OCT Harbour. In 2020, another OCT Harbour project with a total investment of 8 billion RMB also successfully landed in Zhongshan, Guangdong. The success in model replication enables OCT Group to obtain even more prominent social standing and business success: ‘The export of a model is critical. Sorting out a model for the wetland is crucial as it allows for its replication in the future, ultimately becoming an intangible cultural asset of OCT Group’ (Interviewee 17, chief operation director).

Individual actors

Visitors

OCT Park promotes visitors’ knowledge production mainly in two ways. The first way to facilitate knowledge coproduction is to make environmental knowledge ubiquitous by setting up exhibition boards, notice boards, interactive devices and a wetland museum. These facilities emphasise active exploration and interaction, conveying fun and knowledge by adopting the tone of the creatures in the park. For instance, in places where snakes and lizards may be present, the notice boards read: ‘Snake: I am your shy friend. When you meet me in the aisle, please wait for me to hide before passing by’ and ‘Lizard: I am bathing in the sun, you can observe carefully beside!’ by reading these words, visitors not only learn about animal habits but also discover the concept of equal subjectivity between human and non-human beings. In places where bird droppings fall, the exhibition board reading ‘Be careful with the “jackpot”’ reminds visitors to be cautious and introduces birds’ physiologies and habits while guiding visitors to explore why birds gather there (Figure 2a). It dilutes visitors’ embarrassment and anger derived from being hit by bird droppings and reminds them that they are entering an environment where the creatures play dominant roles. Interactive devices are also sites where knowledge is transferred with heightened intensity. There are structures made of discarded wooden piles, bamboo and weeds named ‘insect hotels’ set along the tour route to allow visitors to observe natural degradation processes and insect inhabitation (Figure 2c). With a brief introduction, it conveys the concept that there is no waste for nature but only material cycles, while demonstrating how seemingly humble insects and microbes play a huge role in the cycle. In these ways, visitors acquire knowledge about wildlife and ecosystems and are steered to develop embodied understandings and recognition of equality between human and non-human elements in nature.

Figure 2.

Interactive facilities in OCT Park: (a) notice board ‘beware of bird dropping’, (b) bird-watching window and (c) insect hotel.

The second way is to deliberately design experiences that are, in the words of the staff in the park, ‘inconvenient’ and ‘inactive’. For one thing, the park prioritises protecting animal habitats, which inevitably causes ‘inconvenience’ to visitors. For example, most birds gather on Egrets Island in the middle of the water and the southern shore, but visitors are strictly prohibited from accessing these two areas. Even bird watching is restricted to specific areas and facilities. For instance, four bird-watching houses are evenly distributed along the trail, all made of wood-coloured materials, adopting the bionic style and covered with climbing plants on the outside. The bird-watching houses are separated from where birds live by the mighty reeds. Moreover, the lookout windows made of reeds along the tour trail are hidden among the weeds on the shore, perfectly integrated with the surrounding environment while avoiding the accidental collision of birds (Figure 2b). The trails and installations enhance the impromptu nature of the encounters between visitors and birds. Of course, not all tourists can understand this arrangement. During the fieldwork, complaints can also be heard from disappointed visitors, such as ‘It’s so boring here! I waited for a long time and didn’t see a single bird!’ and ‘No birds at all! I will never come again!’ But more visitors expressed their support and were able to appreciate the unique encounter created by this arrangement:

Watching birds across the sea with a telescope is not interesting. In fact, I think the advantage of forest birds [here] is that they are always flying, and when you are next to them, you will feel that they are related to you. (Interviewee 48, non-local visitor)

OCT Park also often shows an attitude of ‘inaction’ when facing visitors’ demands or complaints, ‘forcing’ them to realise that nature’s rhythms are not always compatible with modern urban life. For instance, OCT Park often receives complaints from visitors about the excessive number of mosquitoes and requests to carry out pest control. Also, the increasing number of bees along the trails troubles many visitors. OCT Park refrains from catering to visitors in these aspects. Instead, the park regards the increase of mosquitoes and bees as the natural outcome of the ecosystem’s evolution and a sign of ecological recovery. Even though many staff are often bitten by mosquitoes, they refuse to use any pesticides and hope to pass on the concept of equality of all lives and the ethos of non-intervention to visitors. The park has even set up displays explaining why mosquitoes are essential to the ecosystem. Moreover, many visitors regarded OCT Park as a tourist attraction when they first came, expecting rich service facilities, and the first impression at the park inevitably disappointed them. Yet, the park chose not to cater to such opinions and complaints:

We only built some very basic tour facilities. There are only three recreational areas in the whole park, and even the toilets are only at the east gate and the exhibition hall. Some visitors also asked us to add some pavilions, but we didn’t accept it. Overall, we hope to make it as convenient as possible for [non-human] creatures, not humans, here. There are already many places for people. (Interviewee 7, operation staff)

Instead of showing the ideas and knowledge to visitors directly, these lived ‘inconvenient’ and ‘inactive’ experiences stimulate visitors to think about the hidden meanings – the respect for nature – behind these designs, as the staff expect: ‘I kindly request that you approach it respectfully. I hope you will observe with reverence rather than expecting everything to be perfectly arranged, like a photoshoot set. We absolutely refrain from engaging in such practices’ (Interviewee 1, operation staff).

Besides direct management of visitor experiences, OCT Park also provides nature education to interested visitors. Nature education facilitates knowledge co-production in two ways: its emphasis on embodied experiences as an important form of knowledge and its openness to the outcome of education without prior scripts. OCT Nature School was established based on the wetlands’ natural resources and environmental amenities, aiming to promote ‘the wisdom of nature’ to the public and rebuild the bridge connecting humans with nature. According to its Charter, it has three significances: ‘(1) to be close to wetland, to be friendly to nature, and to get inner peace; (2) to experience in natural environment, and to wake up our reverence of nature; and (3) to build a link between human and nature, and to inspire responsibility and action to protect environment’. In this sense, the school does not adopt a traditional teaching and learning method to deliver existing knowledge to the participants. Still, it regards the direct contact with nature as both its objective and methods, because the embodied experiences in nature are valuable in themselves. In fact, nature education in OCT Park initially aims to tackle nature-deficit disorders, namely a series of problems experienced by children in cities, such as attention deficit, decreasing problem-solving ability and anxiety. Through embodied contact with nature, nature education encourages participants, especially children, to understand nature through interactive natural classrooms and form a consciousness of loving and protecting wildlife: ‘Nature education can be seen as a roundabout way of achieving this goal, as it targets individuals but ultimately aims to protect the environment. It starts by changing people’s attitudes and behaviours towards nature’ (Interviewee 8, natural education director).

Themed courses constitute the core of nature education at OCT Park, which has been developed into more than 10 modules (e.g. Zero Waste, Traceless Wetland), plus more than 100 seasonal courses in 33 themes (e.g. Bird Class in spring, Mangrove Class in summer). Between 2014 and 2020, more than 1800 sessions were conducted. Taking the autumn course FUN Nature Class as an example, it is designed for children older than four and their parents, lasting 2.5–3 hours per session. The objective of this course, as stated in the official brochure, is: ‘In the form of natural experience, the course emphasises perceptual learning in the natural environment to provide opportunities for exploring and studying in nature for participants and to help them build intimate feelings with nature’. Guided by three to four volunteers and staff members, the participants need to complete a three-stage task running through the indoor and outdoor classrooms. They will first be assigned the roles of specific organisms in the wetland food chain, which will also be their nicknames during the course, and learn the basics about the ecosystem. Then, they are instructed to observe the environment and living conditions of organisms in the park according to their assigned roles, collecting dead branches and fallen leaves, with magnifiers, binoculars and shovels provided. During the outdoor activity, the participants can bring small creatures like fish and insects back for indoor observation, but they must return them to nature after class. Finally, they will gather in the classroom again, communicate their discovery about food chains and natural cycles of ecosystems and make artwork using the natural objects collected, such as dead branches and fallen leaves. Through the class, personalised experiential knowledge and embodied experiences of feeling and touching nature are cultivated, which are not unified or standardised among individual participants but nonetheless point to the recognition of equal and harmonised human–nature relationships:

It’s a good thing for a child to get out and learn about nature … I don’t know much about my surrounding environment [before]. Through this course, I learned together with children. We learned about nature, how to protect the environment and that animals and we humans are equal. (Interviewee 37, non-local visitor)

Volunteers

A large team of professional environmental protection volunteers makes up another critical component of OCT Park, supplementing a limited number of full-time staff. OCT Park has a systematic and detailed workflow of volunteer recruitment, training and assignment. The system consists of recruited volunteering teachers and youth volunteers, supplemented by outsourced volunteers from the Shenzhen Volunteer Federation, Shenzhen Lions Club and university volunteer teams. In OCT Park, volunteers play a dual role in the knowledge co-production process. On the one hand, they first complete training in knowledge and skills, then pass on the pro-environmental knowledge and concepts they have learned to visitors in their daily work; in other words, this process mainly facilitates knowledge learning. On the other hand, in the practice of learning and transferring knowledge, volunteers continue to gain embodied experience in interaction with people and contact with nature, which creates a strong sense of personal identification with environmental protection and cultivates their environmental awareness and behaviours; this knowledge-making process nurtures a more far-reaching impact.

For the volunteer system to operate effectively and sustainably, the park must first ensure the commitment of volunteers. While recruiting and training volunteers, the management team imparts necessary environmental protection knowledge and work skills. More notably, it emphasises volunteers’ committed service, requires persistence and patience and expects them to invest time and work. The training usually takes three to four months, during which time all the participants are required to take various forms of training, including ‘feeling nature’ courses, team-building activities, sharing sessions by senior volunteers and programme design training. There are also advanced training sessions, such as tour guidance and birdwatching. Before candidates become qualified volunteers, they must accumulate sufficient knowledge of nature and establish a sense of identity with environmental protection. Moreover, candidates must also pass interviews, written tests, internships and assessments before starting work, during which only about 30 candidates can be selected from hundreds of applicants. To ensure that the selected are genuinely passionate about environmental protection and can keep their commitment, OCT Park collects a small amount of ‘caution money’ from shortlisted volunteers, which they only get back after completing training and undertaking a certain amount of work. The strict screening and training process guarantees that volunteers are well equipped with professional knowledge and skills, as well as motivating volunteers’ enthusiasm to be recognised through dedicated work.

During their service, volunteers diffuse pro-environmental concepts while also improving their ecological awareness and obtaining a sense of self-realisation. Providing knowledge of the local ecology to visitors is an essential responsibility of volunteers. Along the park trails, they educate visitors about wetland restoration, identification and control of invasive species, taxonomy of fauna and flora, etc. They also raise inspiring questions to visitors based on their ages, interests and identities, and patiently answer visitors’ questions based on their understanding and experiences. In addition, volunteers are responsible for promptly stemming visitors’ inappropriate behaviours, which often leads to confrontations from the latter. For example, some visitors were keen to bring food to feed the birds. When volunteers stopped them, they argued that feeding red-billed gulls was allowed in Dianchi Lake in Kunming, Yunnan Province; hence, there was no rationale for it to be prohibited in Shenzhen. Volunteers thus had to learn relevant knowledge in the first place and explain to visitors that due to reliance on human feeding, some red-billed gulls lost their ability to forage and then starved to death during the season of no visitors. The interaction and negotiation with tourists also prompted volunteers’ active learning and urged more resolute protection of wetlands, constituting a typical iterative learning process in ULLs (von Wirth et al., 2019). The volunteers believe that their persistent efforts are not only about delivering pro-environmental knowledge in situ but also about improving the environmental literacy of citizens across the city. It is in their voluntary work that true love and a sense of responsibility for environmental protection take shape:

In fact, being a volunteer is not an easy task. Putting on this uniform carries a sense of responsibility. … Despite the challenges, interacting with nature is still a pleasant experience. If we don’t have a genuine love for this place, it would be difficult to persist in this role. (Interviewee 22, volunteer)

In these processes, the volunteers work for visitors and, more importantly, work with nature, which allows them to gain more in-depth experiences in nature than ordinary visitors. Through a series of interactions with creatures and the ecosystem, volunteers establish embodied and emotional connections with the wetland, recognise the conservation philosophy of the park and gain behavioural changes. For one thing, these changes come from what they see and feel in the wetland that is different from their daily life and from their role as a ‘protagonist’ of the wetland. As some volunteers have remarked, the nature they feel here is full of vitality and organic rhythms, and the creatures are real and alive. The experiences and psychological responses brought by such encounters are entirely different from learning through indirect media such as documentaries. More importantly, their embodied natural experiences at OCT Park open up a new horizon of possible lifestyles for them, which drives them to take what they learn in the park into their everyday routines. For instance, from serving at OCT Park, the volunteers who are teachers will bring what they learned in the park back to their own classrooms; some volunteers changed their lifestyles from being homebodies to outdoor nature adventurers; and some have become keen on participating in various environmental protection charities and even turn into learned experts in comparative studies of conservation methods in different reserves. Often, many volunteers start to pay more attention to nature around their everyday spaces and to value protection:

I can easily play in nature, just like in a ‘secret garden’. … I have gained a more systematic understanding of nature and living organisms, which has also led to changes in my daily life. Sometimes, on my way to school, I pay attention to interesting insects, plants and birds around me. I observe nature and focus on the small details of my life. (Interviewee 23, volunteer)

The possibility of developing emotional connection and achieving self-satisfaction is a key reason for volunteers to maintain their dedication. Volunteers of different classes, genders and identities establish a sense of shared belonging based on the wetland. For instance, throughout the training and service, volunteers with various backgrounds are named after ‘natural objects’, such as lavender, hibiscus, snowy owl, creek, etc. Their identities in society at large are rendered invisible, while new identities embedded and embodied in the context of the wetland are established through volunteering. Meanwhile, OCT Park also intends to strengthen the cohesion of volunteer groups and to give them a deep collective consciousness by regularly organising training courses and team building. For example, it holds annual volunteer meetings to thank volunteers who have actively invested their time and energy in services, emphasising gratitude for volunteers and further enabling them to gain a sense of accomplishment, pride and self-recognition. As many volunteers said, they were not coming to the park to offer service but to meet old friends and experience nature. In these ways, OCT Park achieves stability and growth for the volunteer team, having accumulatively trained 13 batches of environmental protection volunteers and three batches of youth volunteers, totalling nearly 600, who had contributed more than 150,000 service hours in over 6000 activities by the time of our fieldwork. As the mother of a mother–daughter duo commented, volunteering has sowed seeds of environmental protection in people’s hearts:

That year, my daughter’s service hours far exceeded the required 24 hours. … One day, she asked me if her service time was enough for 24 hours. I laughed and asked her if she had come here for these 24 hours. She said no, and then I knew the goal had been achieved. (Interviewee 18, volunteer)

Conclusion

OCT Park presents a prima facie experiment that explores how ecological conservation can be conducted in a rapidly urbanising context involving multiple actors. In brief, OCT Park harbours a mutually collaborative relationship between two institutional actors, namely the state and OCT Group, which have hitherto institutionalised the experiment outcomes into scalable governance or business models. In addition, the park also provides a unique perspective into ordinary individual participants in this ULL and the lived environmental knowledge and subjectivities that they co-produce. In the park, visitors have situated, impromptu encounters with nature, although subject to the manipulation of pre-established tour routes or pre-designed nature education programmes. In comparison, volunteers participate both as receivers of knowledge propagated by the park and as protagonists of pro-environmental ideas and behaviours. For both types of actors, sustainability does not refer to abstract policy or technical models, but a decentred and diffused process drawing on material and spatial settings, lived encounters with natural elements and interactive processes of learning. Unlike institutional actors, individual participants facilitate the co-production of knowledge mainly through lived experiences and incremental changes to their cognitions and behaviours. The co-production manifests itself as the internalisation of pro-environmental awareness and behavioural changes through situated praxis.

Through the case of OCT Park, we advocate for a multi-dimensional knowledge model that advances our understanding of ULLs in two ways. Firstly, it is essential to attend to diverse actors in ULLs, especially individual participants who are often regarded as passive receivers of experiment designs, and their implications for sustainability and environmental protection. Admittedly, the degrees and forms of the participation of individual actors are unavoidably stipulated by the experimental design stipulated by institutional actors, thus constituting unequal relations of power, and their behaviours and response may also be incorporated to justify scalable innovations in environmental governance and business development. However, individual actors’ experiential and lived knowledge constitutes an indispensable part of environmental knowledge and a key source of eco-subjectivities. In the ULLs, individual participants produce knowledge through embodied experiences and constant interaction with real-world settings and varied actors. In this study, though much of the knowledge learned in the park is encoded a priori, the encounters with nature are always situated and open-ended, opening the possibility for ongoing affirmation, reproduction and enrichment of knowledge. By including individual actors in a fuller theorisation of ULLs, a hierarchical heuristic of knowledge production is challenged. For one thing, knowledge production is not necessarily based on circuits between spatial or administrative scales but on experiences in real-world settings and situated networks of praxis, socialities and meaning-making processes. For another, part of the knowledge produced by individual actors may not be abstracted as institutional arrangements or policy innovations that rely on multi-level frameworks for diffusion. Instead, it is practised as part of prosaic life but has important implications for the making of environmental awareness and subjectivities.

The case of OCT Park also leads to the second insight; that is, that the often-overlooked lived knowledge constitutes an unignorable part of knowledge production in ULLs, which is non-scalable but may have broad implications for urban sustainability beyond the immediate contexts of ULLs. On the one hand, individual participants may apply the lived knowledge to their everyday lives in the form of cognitive and behavioural changes, through which ULLs generate broader impacts over time. In this vein, lived experiences co-constitute a desirable experiment outcome and a means of ‘moving sustainable practices from experimentation to mainstream’ (van den Bosch, 2010: 68). Therefore, the efficacy of an experiment not only depends on its transfer across different scales through institutional arrangements but also on the lived knowledge and consciousness that it inculcates. On the other hand, lived experiences, as well as the relations, differences and interactions embedded in them, may not be scalable but rather make up a rich source of experimental knowledge for practice and dissemination in mundane lives. Admittedly, environmental knowledge made or learned by individual actors cannot exist in isolation from the contextual conditions orchestrated by OCT Park, but experiential and personalised knowledge still plays an unneglectable role in creating eco-citizenship and achieving environmental objectives. Echoing the point of Tsing (2012) that non-scalability presents an alternative to scalability, we further argue that non-scalability offers a complementary perspective to knowledge co-production in ULLs, which ultimately aims to realise the efficacy of the experiment and evoke positive societal and environmental transformation. In this sense, scalability and non-scalability are two coexisting aspects in ULL knowledge co-production, and they jointly constitute the multi-dimensional knowledge model that we advocate in this article.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study received funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42071171) and the Guangdong Provincial Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. 2018B030312004).

ORCID iDs

Zijing Shen

Junxi Qian

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