Launch of LICER, a laboratory designed to overhaul municipal regulations

Montréal, winner of the Smart Cities Challenge

The Smart Cities Challenge is a competition initiated by the Government of Canada, in which the Ville de Montréal won the first prize of $50 million to carry out innovative projects and improve the quality of life of citizens.

Over the next five years, Montréal and its partners will implement a program structured around two main components:

A mobility component to make commuting more efficient and reduce the use of single-occupant vehicles.
A food security component to provide healthy, locally produced food to vulnerable people.

The projects developed by the partners of the Smart Cities Challenge with respect to mobility and food security will be supported by a cross-disciplinary approach of collaborative governance and data governance. It is in this framework that LICER will intervene in particular as a lever for collaboration and citizen engagement.

The reason behind a laboratory like LICER?

The project partners share a vision of change to make Montréal a resilient city that is making a necessary ecological transition. However, municipal governance models sometimes are difficult to adapt effectively and quickly to the innovative nature of certain projects that respond to current social and environmental issues.

LICER is a lever to support the innovative nature of proposed projects in mobility and food security by providing a space for innovation and co-experimentation which focuses on the challenges and regulatory opportunities that these projects face.

Led by the MIS in collaboration, for the first year, with Cité-ID/ENAP and Dark Matter Lab, LICER will team up with a diversity of actors from different networks, sectors and levels of intervention (academics, citizens, private, public, municipal, national, etc.), in order to identify regulatory challenges and opportunities to the implementation of their projects and propose concrete and realistic options.

By using a cross-disciplinary approach to support mobility and food security projects, LICER offers an opening for social R&D in co-creation and prototyping, specifically dedicated to regulatory innovation.

The next steps for LICER

Between now and December 2020, LICER will plan the activities of the next four years through a proposal for the roll-out of experiments.

Three structuring actions have been identified:

Identify the issues requiring concrete regulatory experiments within targeted projects with partners from the mobility and food safety clusters.
Explore the issues targeted by these experiments by profiling the people involved and their influence, as well as the regulatory design processes.
Define LICER’s experiments and their scope within the framework of the Smart Cities Challenge, by: identifying the potential for regulatory innovation; defining an experimental methodology that will be applied in the long term, as well as the methods and indicators for evaluating and reinjecting the learning associated with them; identifying the issues requiring concrete regulatory experiments within targeted projects with the partners of the two clusters.

Stay tuned to follow the evolution of the laboratory and the next phases by browsing the MIS news and the Montréal en commun website.