In recent years, urban experimentation has firmly entered the vocabulary of urban transformation research through an extensive body of literature on transition management, environmental policy and governance, human geography and planning, sustainability, and real-world lab research. Urban experimentation broadly refers to "an approach associated with a set of practices that characterizes contemporary urban innovation and the profusion of place-based approaches such as pilots, demonstrations and living laboratories" (Evans et al. 2021, 172). The experimental turn in the sustainability sciences occurring since the 2000s widely understands experimentalism (Karvonen & Bylund, 2023; Parodi et al., 2023) as crucial in translating knowledge into action - a form of knowledge production while doing (Schön, 1995). For long claimed as action-based enforcement that materializes in urban contexts, experimentation enables urban actors to become more responsive to the evolving needs of citizens, framing contingencies such as climate change and multiple crises (Lissandrello et al., 2023), and offering opportunities to produce transformative capacity (Wolfram et al., 2019; Healey, 1998).
The vast literature on urban experimentation and experimentalist agendas continuously raises questions about environmental problems and the complex challenges of contemporary ecological and climate change governance agendas (Haderer et al., 2024). Experimentation is, therefore, also becoming a way to understand not just the sense of uncertainty in urban governance but also as a remedy to the limited knowledge over the consequences of radical wicked problems, reflecting the permanent state of indeterminacy and contingency of contemporary society. Therefore, this thematic collection aims to draw attention to and to unpack urban experimentation regarding dynamics of uncertainties, power relations, and applied governance capacities approaches in the context of green and sustainable urban transformations.
The collection welcomes articles that move discussions on and beyond the following themes:
(i) Research methodologies and varieties of urban experimentation to understand concrete challenges and opportunities for transformative urban research and sustainability practice
(ii) Models of urban governance that find expression in urban experimentation as a potential for transformative change, citizen participation and urban democracy practice, and which inspire urban management capacities, future visions, and strategic urban planning
(iii) Reflexive, scientific, inter- and transdisciplinary approaches dealing with current material, financial, and socio-political realities that define urban experimentation.
The growing focus on urban experimentation and its various specific ideas of transformative capacities necessitate urban research efforts to examine the meaning of urban experimentalism as a planning and governance mode for short-term solutions as well as for reflecting and reproducing mid- and long-term futures and the re-generation of agency of individuals and organisations to transform existing institutions and social systems.
References
Evans, J., T. Vacha, H. Kok, and K. Watson. 2021. “How Cities Learn: From Experimentation to Transformation.” Urban Planning 6 (1): 171–182. doi: 10.17645/up.v6i1.3545.
Haderer, M., Dannemann, H. and Blühdorn, I. (2024). Revisiting the promise of eco-political experimentation: an introduction to the Special Issue, Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 20:1, 2296722, DOI: 10.1080/15487733.2023.2296722
Healey, P. (1998). Building institutional capacity through collaborative approaches to urban planning. Environment and planning A, 30(9), 1531-1546.
Karvonen, A., & Bylund, J. (2023). Small measures, large change: the promise and peril of incremental urbanization. In H. Haarstad, J. Grandin, K. Kjærås, & E. Johnson (Eds.), Haste: The slow politics of climate urgency (pp. 153-161). London: UCL Press.
Lissandrello, E., Sørensen, J., Olesen, K., & Steffansen, R. N. (2023). The 'New Normal ' in Planning, Governance and Participation: Transforming Urban Governance in a Post-pandemic World. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Mayne, Q., De Jong, J., & Fernandez-Monge, F. (2020). State capabilities for problem-oriented governance. Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 3(1), 33-44.
Parodi, O., Steglich, A., Bylund, J. (2023). Real-World Lab. In: Thorsten Philipp/Tobias Schmohl, Handbook Transdisciplinary Learning (287-296). Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839463475-030 pdf here: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/194543
Schön, D. A. (1995). Knowing-in-action: The new scholarship requires a new epistemology. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 27(6), 27-34.
Wolfram, M., Borgström, S., & Farrelly, M. (2019). Urban transformative capacity: From concept to practice. Ambio, 48, 437-448.
