Urban Transformation is calling for submissions to our Collection on Urban Experimentation and Learning. Green, Sustainable and Just Transformative Capacities?
In recent years, experimentation has firmly entered the vocabulary of urban transformation research 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" (see: Karvonen, 2018; Karvonen & Bylund, 2023). 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. 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 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. 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 thematic collection aims to draw attention to the uncertainties, power dynamics, and transformative governance capacities in the context of green and sustainable urban transformations. 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 mid- and long-term futures.
References:
Karvonen, A. (2018). The city of permanent experiments? In B. Turnheim, P. Kivimaa, & F. Burkhout (Eds.), Innovating climate governance: Moving beyond experiments (pp. 201–215). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108277679.014
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.
