The Experimental City

James Evans, Andrew Karvonen, Rob Raven, James Evans, Andrew Karvonen, Rob Raven

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138856202
• eBook ISBN: 9781317517146
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book explores how the concept or urban experimentation is being used to reshape practices of knowledge production in urban debates about resilience, climate change governance, and socio-technical transitions.

With contributions from leading scholars, and case studies from the Global North and South, from small to large scale cities, this book suggests that urban experiments offer novel modes of engagement, governance, and politics that both challenge and complement conventional strategies. The book is organized around three cross-cutting themes. Part I explores the logics of urban experimentation, different approaches, and how and why they are deployed. Part II considers how experiments are being staged within cities, by whom, and with what effects? Part III examines how entire cities or groups of cities are constructed as experiments.

This book seeks to contribute a deeper and more socially and politically nuanced understanding of how urban experiments shape cities and drive wider changes in society, providing a framework to examine the phenomenon of urban experimentation in conceptual and empirical detail.

1 The experimental city

New modes and prospects of urban transformation

James Evans, Andrew Karvonen and Rob Raven

DOI: 10.4324/9781315719825-1

The world hates change yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.

(Charles Kettering)

The promise of experimentation

As the global population becomes increasingly urbanised, cities have emerged as the dominant arenas to address the grand challenges facing humanity. Problems associated with climate change, economic under-development and social inequality are essentially urban in character. And so are their solutions. The burgeoning realisation that ‘business as usual’ will no longer do has prompted a search for alternative ways to organise, plan, manage, and live in cities. Experimentation promises a way to do this, gaining traction in cities all over the world as a mode of governance to stimulate alternatives and steer change (Bulkeley and Castán Broto 2012). Policy makers, designers, private companies and third sector organisations are initiating innovation activities to trial alternative future visions of local economic development, social cohesion, environmental protection, creative sector expansion, policy evolution, service delivery, infrastructure provision, academic research, and more (Karvonen et al. 2014).

The concept of experimentation feeds on attractive notions of innovation and creativity (both individual and collective) while reframing the emphasis of sustainability from distant targets and government policies to concrete and achievable actions that can be undertaken by a wide variety of urban stakeholders in specific places (Karvonen and van Heur 2014). The ability of urban experiments to be radical in ambition while limited in scope underpins a vibrant debate in both the policy and academic worlds with respect to their ability to prompt genuine change. Are they simply extensions of business as usual, spatially limited and captured by a familiar cast of dominant interests? Or can they generate real alternatives and stimulate profound transformation? The profusion of major international research projects currently addressing this very question suggests that there is no simple answer (see Castán Broto and Bulkeley 2013; McGuirk et al. 2014; Wieczorek et al. 2015).

The goal of this book is to make sense of urban experimentation as a rapidly emerging field of practice and theory by bringing different approaches and cases into dialogue with one another. To set the scene, this introductory chapter surveys key themes that animate urban experimentation as a field of study before introducing the contributions that comprise the volume.

While an ethos of experimentation has arguably animated the urban project from classical antiquity onwards, urban experiments are currently being deployed more widely and explicitly than at any other time (Evans 2011). The Mayor of Bogatá, Enrique Peñalosa, is famous for transforming the city from one of the most dangerous and unpleasant places to live into a global leader in sustainable urbanism by the end of the 1990s. What he calls the ‘Bogatá experiment’ started with a far smaller one, the dia sin carro or day without cars, which catalysed the global ‘Happy City’ movement (Montgomery 2013). Real-world experiments can create powerful shared values by letting people experience a different possible future – in this case a city with no cars. This is just one of a multitude of urban movements that share a commitment to changing the way in which we build, manage and live in cities through explicitly staging experiments. Smart cities, eco-cities, low carbon urbanism, urban living labs, happy cities and sustainable urban development all draw on the idea that experimentation can generate more liveable, prosperous and sustainable urban futures (de Jong et al. 2015). Experimentation forms a common thread running through otherwise disparate contemporary urban trends, from corporatised attempts to create smart, low carbon cities to grassroots civic movements to make neighbourhoods more socially cohesive. It is for this reason that urban experimentation has come rapidly to prominence across a broad spectrum of urban practice and thought.

While assuming many forms, urban experimentation can be distinguished conceptually from conventional urban development or policy by an explicit emphasis on learning from real-world interventions. Urban experimentation offers a framework within which to arrange instruments, materials and people to induce change in a controlled manner, and subsequently evaluate and learn from those changes (Karvonen and van Heur 2014). The institutionalisation of experimentation sets contemporary activities apart from more broadly experimental approaches to urbanism practiced in previous decades and, indeed, as Gross suggests (2010: 66) ‘anything that is subject to change’. This ethos of experimentation resonates with the broader emergence of reflexive governance and the importance of learning within and between networks of urban actors (McFarlane 2011a, 2011b). Current attempts in cities to learn through place-based experimentation reflect Beck’s (1995: 15) model of reflexive modernity, seeking to reconcile ‘the science of data and the science of experience’ through real-world experiments. Research inspired by the laboratory studies tradition and socio-technical studies has revealed how experiments spread by supplying both tangible evidence of impacts and outcomes and experiential evidence through the demonstration of alternatives in real-life settings (Marres 2009). Experimenting in cities promises scientifically rigorous knowledge that both reflects and is shaped by the context of lived experience and which as a result can be applied more quickly and successfully (Evans and Karvonen 2011). Various manifestations of the experimental mode of governance like living labs, maker spaces and hackathons hold the potential to reconnect the traditional political institutions of modernity – characterised by Beck as ‘zombie’ institutions that are dead but still alive (Boyne 2001) – with the experiences and needs of everyday urban life.

The promise of learning, and by extension innovation, lends experimentation considerable rhetorical power as a method through which to scale up from individual examples. As experimental activities reinterpret and reframe the trajectories of contemporary urban development, different frameworks are being developed to understand these processes. In their survey of Australian cities McGuirk et al. (2014) distinguish between institutional and practical experiments, with the former entailing experiments in arrangements within and between institutions to produce new ways of governing and the latter involving novel practical actions. Focusing on the transformative capacity of experiments, Smith and Raven (2012) distinguish between ‘fit-and-conform’ and ‘stretch-and-transform’ modes of change, which refer to experiments that take place within dominant institutional contexts versus those that transform their contexts. Practical experiments can prompt broader institutional change, and for many this represents the sine qua non of urban experimentation as a worthy pursuit. For others, urban experiments open up spaces for new kinds of governance and action in the city, giving centre stage to social interests that are downplayed under dominant governance arrangements but which over time may coalesce into coherent pathways to wider transformation (Bulkeley et al. 2015).

A key question emerging from the literature concerns the politics of experimentation, or more specifically who is allowed to take part at both the institutional and practical levels. For example, the smart city discourse as articulated in Europe and Asia has hitherto focused on trialling technological ‘solutions’ in real cities, privileging multinational corporations as urban actors (Vanolo 2014; Viitanen and Kingston 2014). In contrast, the Transition Towns movement positions local communities as the designers and instigators of urban experiments (Smith 2011; Seyfang and Haxeltine 2013, Aiken 2014, Feola and Nunes 2014). In reframing urban development experimentation shifts the balance of power between actors, empowering some while disempowering others, and privileging new forms of knowledge and evidence in the process (Karvonen et al. 2014). In some cases, the availability of information about the performance of experiments invites a data-driven approach to urban governance. In others, it militates a design-led approach to urban development, as cities and parts of them become positioned as urban living labs, serving as laboratories for radical change in which users are involved in the co-design of solutions to pressing urban problems (Nevens et al. 2013; Voytenko et al. 2015).

Much like the localism trap in development studies, which assumes that initiatives at the local level are somehow fairer, there is a tendency to assume that urban experimentation is an a priori beneficial endeavour. In their recent review, Luque-Ayala and Marvin (2015) highlight the need for smart urbanism to be more experimental, but Masdar City, perhaps the most high profile example of a smart eco-city, positions itself explicitly as an experimental city, albeit a highly technocentric and corporatist one (Shelton et al. 2015). Experiments, understandings of experiments, and the attendant future visions they entail, are not inherently positive but carry politics just like any other development strategy.

Closely related and an increasingly important dimension of urban experimentation concerns how success is defined and measured. The quote at the start of this chapter is from Charles Kettering (1876–1958), an American inventor who led the research division of General Motors for 27 years. He patented the electric starter amongst numerous electric and lighting systems for cars, paving the way for the huge success of General Motors in establishing the automobile as a primary focus of urban planning in the second half of the twentieth century. The unintended consequences of this success – pollution, congestion, poor health and the destruction of communities – are both well-known and a central focus of cities that are striving to realise more sustainable urban futures. Strictly speaking, this example concerns innovation rather than experimentation, but the point holds in relation to how the evaluation of experiments can vary significantly depending on what outcomes are seen to constitute success. The definitions of success that inform evaluation often reflect the political goals and approaches of the specific actors involved, including researchers themselves (Voytenko et al. 2015). For example, transition scholars tend to highlight success when experimentation produces more environmentally friendly development pathways, while urban scholars highlight success when experiments are more socially and democratically robust. Caution is required here. Many different definitions of experimentation are at play, and the way in which experiments are designed, mobilised and evaluated differs hugely.

Debates concerning the politics of urban experimentation lead inexorably to the question of how an experiment or set of experiments drives wider transformation. This is a key topic of concern motivating this volume and many of the theoretical frameworks presented are essentially attempts to conceptualise this process. In relation to the low carbon agenda, numerous successful experiments have been established in cities over the last 20 years, leading funding bodies, policy makers, charities, companies and communities to a shared contemporary focus on how to translate discrete experiments into broader change. Part of the allure of experimentation is based on the assumption that it is possible to scale up from an individual project to the city through a process of trialling, learning and rolling out (Brown and Vergragt 2008; Evans 2011) but the complexity of achieving broader change is often hidden behind a lexicon of verbs such as upscaling, replicating, transforming, seeding, rolling out, and breaking through. These words imply quite different understandings of how change unfolds over space and time, blackboxing the social and political agency through which it takes place (Pesch 2015). While a revolution is enacted by revolutionaries, experiments, transformations and transitions have no obvious corresponding terms, despite the fact that they imply a power dynamic whereby certain (more powerful) groups are experimenting on other (less powerful) groups with the purpose of transforming or transitioning them.

Focusing on experiments directs attention to the specific social and material contexts in which urban change is embedded and through which it literally ‘takes place’. Understanding experiments as sites through which ‘particular urban infrastructure regimes … are configured and challenged’ (Bulkeley et al. 2014: 1477) resonates with current understandings that emphasise the relational and provisional aspects through which the city is comprised (Graham and McFarlane 2015). Urban Political Ecology with its emphasis on flows of power and materials, socio-technical studies with its emphasis on the coevolution of technology and society, and critical infrastructure studies focus on the ways in which urban institutions, techniques and artefacts are ‘established, maintained and challenged’ (Monstadt 2009: 14). The process of urban experimentation unfolds over space and time through reworking the relationships between social and material networks in the context of existing economic, social and political trajectories.

The body of work that has emerged around the idea of transitions presents an increasingly influential way to think about this relationship. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• 1 The experimental city: new modes and prospects of urban transformation
• PART I Logics of experimentation
• PART II Experimenting in cities
• PART III Experimental cities
• Index