We are from now ready welcoming submissions to a special collection in the journal of Urban Transformation!
You can find details from the call here: Urban Experimentation and Learning. Green, Sustainable and Just Transformative Capabilities?.
As Guest Editors for the Collection, we hope you will consider this as an outlet for a future research paper.
Urban Transformation is published by BMC. All submissions are assessed according to the standard editorial criteria and peer review process. Full submission guidelines can be read on the website.
As this is an Open Access journal, and full information on the article-processing charge can be read at the fees and funding page.
If you would be interested in contributing to the Collection and if you have any queries, please let us and the Managing Editor (Anika Dacic,
We are eagerly awaiting the submission of your paper!
Kind regards,
The Editorial in Chef team
Enza, Pia, Jonas and Nacima
In recent years, experimentation has firmly entered the vocabulary of urban transformation through an intensive body of literature on transition management, environmental policy and governance, human geography and planning as well as sustainability and real-world lab research. Experimentation refers broadly 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". The experimental turn occurred since the 2000s in sustainability sciences which widely understand experimentalism as crucial in translating knowledge into action, a form of knowledge production while doing (Schon’s learning-by-doing). 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, frame contingencies such as climate change and multiple crises, and offer opportunities for producing transformative capacity.
The vast literature on experimentation and experimentalist agendas continuously raises questions about environmental problems and the complex challenges of contemporary ecological and climate change governance agendas. At the same time, the Green City is becoming a robust imaginative metaphor for future cities under the lens of green policies in the European Union. Greenwashing practices have moved experimentation beyond the urban scales, even entailing more centralized governmental measures for decarbonized, livable, healthy, and circular urban green futures. Experimentation is, therefore, also becoming a way to understand not just the permanent 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 sense of indeterminacy and contingency of contemporary society. 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 transformative change, citizen participation and urban democracy practice to inspire urban management, future visions, and strategic urban planning
(iii) Reflexive, scientific inter and transdisciplinary approaches to urban experimentation, generated by principles of green, sustainability, inclusion, and circular economy and dealing with current material, financial, and socio-political realities
This special collection aims to draw continuous attention to the sense of uncertainty, power dynamics, and transformative governance capabilities in the context of green and sustainable urban societies. The growing focus on urban experimentation and its various specific ideas of transformative capacity necessitate urban research efforts that examine the meaning of urban experimentalism as a planning and governance model for short-term solutions as well as for reflecting and reproducing middle and long-term futures.
