SUMMALab develops and evaluates a meta-lab approach for mobility experiments in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area, the Rotterdam-The Hague Metropolitan Area and the municipalities of The Hague, Delft and Rotterdam. It is a network of one medium-sized and three large cities, but also metropolitan regions, provinces, private partners and knowledge institutions. A meta-lab is not a lab itself, but a collection point where different experiments are brought together so that learning from the experiments can be done faster and better. The meta-lab facilitates decontextualization and recontextualization of lessons learned locally.
In the words of the urban policy makers, SummaLab helps to (1) not reinvent the wheel from other cities (thus preventing very similar pilots), (2) not simply copy, but translate it into a new context, (3) to look broader than the project, the pilot.