Marine Declève, Roselyne de Lestrange and Barbara Le Fort participated in APERAU, an international colloquium in Urbanism. They gave a 20 minutes’ presentation on the role that living-labs, and more specifically an urban research laboratory such as Metrolab, could play in the frame of territorial co-operations processes. In a first stage, the presentation came back on the critical, implied and applied aspects of Metrolab as an innovating co-creation tool allowing to meet metropolitan complexity and to have an impact on urban policies. The second stage came back on the three ongoing researches conducted within the faculty of architecture, urban design and architectural engineering LOCI (UCL) and how they call a research-by-design methodology. Facing similar experiences that took place in others contexts, this session has been a good opportunity to discuss together with among others Frank Scherrer (UdM) the interdisciplinary process, questioning the right equilibrium in the relationships between stakeholders and the academic world.