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Are you interested in investigating urban experiments?
Our debate today works with the article titled Interrogating urban experiments from 2016, by Federico Caprotti and Robert Cowley, published in the Urban Geography journal.
This is a great preparation to our next interview with Arman Mirzakhani in episode 372 talking about the importance of urban experimentation.
Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see whether urban experimentations really live up to their names. This article presents urban experiments as a popular driving force for urban transitions, but also seven areas needing critical attention.
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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today we will introduce a research by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original investigation, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole documentation. This conversation was produced and generated with Notebook LM as two hosts dissecting the whole research.
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Speaker 1: Our focus today is on a really significant shift in how we talk about managing cities. This growing popularity of looking at the urban environment through an experimental lens. You see it popping up everywhere now. Academic papers, policy documents, corporate strategies, using terms like urban experiments, living labs, future labs. And I believe this isn’t just new jargon. It signifies a necessary pragmatic and frankly powerful evolution in how we govern urban change.
Speaker 2: It is rapidly expanding. You’re right. I mean, if you just look at the academic side, the number of mentions were urban experiments and publications. It more than doubled in just six years, roughly between 2010 and 2016. So like you said, this isn’t some niche academic thing anymore. It’s becoming a central idea. That speed and how widespread it is. That’s exactly why we need to pause and ask, what does this language really mean? And maybe more importantly, who does it actually serve?
Speaker 1: And that leads us straight to our central question for today. Does this whole notion of urban experimentation represent a genuinely necessary, valuable and purpose of intervention for governing cities? Is it a deliberate way to innovate and learn, helping us tackle big global goals?
Speaker 2: Alright, is this widespread often Pretty uncritical adoption, just an empty signify, you know, a buzzword. That sounds good. Is so vague. It really demands some deep, critical thinking about its political side, its history, and frankly, who it might be excluding. I’m gonna argue that we absolutely must adopt the kind of urgent, critical scrutiny that the source material calls for.
Speaker 1: And I’ll be arguing that the utility, the sheer transformative potential of using this experimental lens actually far outweighs the risks if, and this is important if we implement it thoughtfully. So. This shift is fundamentally about defining urban governance as a purpose of intervention. What that means is these projects aren’t just random bits of building or policy tweaks. They are quite deliberate, bounded attempts to innovate, to learn, and to gain experience in a way we can actually measure. The goal then is to scale up the things that work.
Speaker 2: Okay. That sounds appealingly systematic. I grant you, but I do need to pause on that phrase you used earlier, empty signifier. Just so we’re clear. What I mean by that is the term urban experiment itself is just so broad, often quite ill-defined. It can be stretched to mean anything from something radically progressive to something reactionary or even regressive. And that flexibility that vagueness it risks stripping the concept of any real political weight or meaning, unless we really dig into the motives behind it.
Speaker 1: But I think the motivation is clear. It’s learning. By doing this whole approach, it’s deeply rooted in some really influential work on sociotechnical transitions. That framework basically looks at changes this complex dance between social systems, things like policies, user habits, and technical innovation. Smart grids, new building materials, that kind of thing. So by setting up these bounded experiments in actual urban spaces, say that smart grid test bed in Austin’s Mueller district, we create these really critical mechanisms for hitting goals like the UN sustainable development goal 11. Making cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. These cities are essentially acting as necessary experimental grounds for figuring out genuinely green urban futures.
Speaker 2: I understand why you’d emphasize that utility. I really do. But the problem as I see it, with just adopting this language without much critic. Is precisely because it often ends up constraining how we think about urban governance. It tends to narrow our view of the city, treating it mainly as a kind of problem that needs solving through technical fixes, through optimization algorithms, rather than seeing it as the complex, often messy political place, it is defined by social relationships and yes, power struggles.
Speaker 1: But surely if we’re facing huge challenges like climate change or incredibly rapid urbanization, doesn’t, treating parts of them as socio-technical problems, things we can test in a controlled way, lead to more efficiency, don’t we need that?
Speaker 2: Efficiency may be, but potentially at the cost of genuine political engagement. That’s the worry. We absolutely have to subject the underlying politics, the ideologies that are baked into this discourse. It’s a critical scrutiny. My core concern here is that so much of the current writing on this seems a historical, it often neglects the long, and let’s be honest, often quite dark history of utopian and sometimes dystopian social and technical experiments. There’s a real risk. We just end up running new versions of old experiments without properly understanding why they failed or who they failed in the past.
Speaker 1: Okay, let’s dig into that then. This claim of historical blindness and political risk. Maybe we can start with the consequences of how we even define the problem in the first place.
Speaker 2: Fundamentally, I’m just not convinced that this experimental approach is ideologically neutral. The moment you start treating this city as an experimental subject. You’re inherently taking a kind of normative stance, an epistemological approach. You’re seeing the city as basically a set of variables you can control and adjust. And that really echoes those optimization frameworks that come straight out of sociotechnical systems theory, where the ultimate goal is often just about optimizing people, technology organizations.
Speaker 1: And why is optimization necessarily a bad thing here?
Speaker 2: Because it carries this significant risk of depoliticization. Think about it. Justifying specific, often top-down interventions by constantly invoking these big notions of crisis, whether it’s climate collapse or demographic shifts, or economic instability. This is actually a key strategy in the current trend of depoliticizing the city when you frame something as an overwhelming crisis. It suddenly becomes a purely technical challenge. It bypasses the need for messy democratic debate and makes it easier to push through specific projects, which might not benefit everyone equally, might even be exclusionary.
Speaker 1: That’s a powerful point about how crisis narratives can be constructed and used. Though I might frame their utility a bit differently while I acknowledge that yes narratives are constructed, the focus on crisis is often actually justified by some really crucial insights from transitions. Research has pretty strongly shown that fundamental shifts in sociotechnical systems, the big changes we need, they might happen most efficiently only after some kind of significant shock. Or when the existing system is perceived to be in deep crisis. Ah, so you’re arguing the crisis isn’t just manufactured fearmongering, but it’s actually a necessary window for change. Exactly. Look at analysis of things like local currency experiments like the tartness pound. The insights there showed that these fundamental alternatives really only gain traction when the mainstream financial system was widely seen as being in deep crisis. So the experimental approach in this light isn’t about manufacturing fear. It’s more pragmatic means to quickly seize these necessary, even if they’re difficult windows of opportunity for systemic change. Precisely when the dominant system is showing its weaknesses.
Speaker 2: Okay. I understand the theory of leveraging a systemic shock, but this focus on top down, normatively defined optimization, it still overlooks where real innovation often comes from, doesn’t it? Which is frequently the grassroots. The very literature we’re discussing actually highlights examples of non-normative experiments, things organized by marginalized communities, silver’s study of slum dwellers in Accra, just connecting themselves to energy networks, completely bypassing the formal systems. hese informal actions, these are often much more fruitful places for genuinely progressive change than the highly organized, well-funded and quite nly restricted labs that policymakers and corporations tend to favor. Those communities are learning, they’re iterating all without needing the label of an experiment,
Speaker 1: and that brings us very neatly to the mechanics of these projects. The idea of boundaries. Now, I would argue that these bounded experiments are specifically defined that way to enable focused innovation. If you look at, say, the example of a zero energy residential building being tested in Boston, that clear boundary is what facilitates taking the lessons learned in actually institutionalizing them, maybe scaling them up. This focus on clear boundaries is pretty essential for that learning by doing process and for translating specific local successes into broader systemic change. That’s really how we move beyond just niche ideas. I see it differently
Speaker 2: though. We have to ask who gets to decide where those boundaries are drawn, and perhaps more critically on whom is the experiment actually being carried out. The literature is very interested in who’s doing the experimenting, but it’s striking how it’s mostly silent. On the question of the experimental subjects, those people have been largely silent or silenced, and this lack of voice, this lack of agency. That’s a massive failure point for me.
Speaker 1: When you say lack of voice, are you talking about, say a lack of feedback mechanisms within the project, or is it something deeper?
Speaker 2: Oh, much deeper. I think when a city decides to roll out, I don’t know, a new smart transport system, or implement some new resource management regime using sensors and data. We talk endlessly about the tech specs, right? Or the data streams. But how often do we genuinely consult or even survey the residents whose data is being hoovered up or whose traditional ways of living, whose community dynamics might be totally disrupted? By imposing these new supposedly clean experimental boundaries, we are in effect running experiments on people, often not with them, and we’re frequently ignoring the ethical costs for those individuals who maybe can’t just opt out of the experiment zone.
Speaker 1: That concern about the lack of agency for the subjects is legitimate, and we absolutely have to strengthen the participatory elements in these kinds of interventions. No question.
Speaker 2: And we also need to widen the whole field of what we consider urban experimentation. We need to acknowledge those areas of friction, those injustices that never quite make it into the glossy policy reports, promoting the latest smart city tech. I’m talking about the less visible, maybe less fashionable. Dark, bounded experimental areas. Places like long-term refugee camps or semi-permanent informal settlements. Thinking about these kinds of spaces, it helps us understand the full spectrum of urban experimentation, including projects that are maybe designed to contain populations or are arguably dystopian right from the start. Ignoring these examples contributes directly to that historical blindness. I mentioned earlier, we have to be acutely aware that the 20th century was absolutely full of social experiments of the, shall we say, totalitarian variety.
Speaker 1: Okay. That historical parallel is certainly sobering, and yes, it forces us to reconsider the perhaps naive innocence of some of our contemporary language. But let’s be clear here. While historical sensitivity is absolutely imperative, equating today’s sustainability experiments, which are overwhelmingly aimed at technical, economic, and socio environmental progress with say, totalitarian urban planning schemes, that risks completely paralysing, productive inquiry, doesn’t it?
Speaker 2: The intent might be framed differently now. Yes, but the mechanisms of boundary setting, control and containment can sometimes echo those past in uncomfortable ways.
Speaker 1: But the focus in the contemporary literature is overwhelmingly on transformative regime change on positive solutions. So rather than arguing, we should sideline the whole concept because of historical parallels that might not fully hold up in terms of intent or context. Shouldn’t we focus on how the concept can be constructively widened? For instance, to include things like non-human agency or social and natural hybrid, recognizing that ecosystems themselves are dynamic participants in how cities change. We need to get more creative than just throwing the term out entirely.
Speaker 2: I agree that widening the field of inquiry is crucial. Only if, and this is the key, only if we anchor that wider inquiry in a really deep, critical awareness of power dynamics and historical context. If we just widen the scope to bring in nature or something without first addressing the issues around the silenced human subjects within these experiments, we just risk continuing to prioritize technological systems and maybe ecological modernization over the actual lived political reality of the city for its people.
Speaker 1: Ultimately, I think the increasing prevalence of this urban experimentation language signifies a really key shift in how we understand and try to govern the city. It does remain a powerful conceptual framework, I believe, for steering urban change towards more sustainable futures. Provided that researchers and practitioners continually ensure these are genuinely purpose of interventions. Interventions capable of creating broader transformative change through clear boundaries, yes, but also through robust institutional learning. It’s a tool we can definitely refine. Not one I think we need to discard.
Speaker 2: That’s a compelling case for Fineman. Absolutely. For me, we must take the lived human city as our starting point. Always. My core concern really remains that without that deep critical awareness of the potential for even well-intentioned, utopian visions to curl into nightmares for the people actually living within them. Then urban practitioners and scholars risk getting trapped. Trapped within a vague, perhaps seductive discursive logic that ends up prioritizing optimization and technical fixes over justice and lived experience.
Speaker 1: So it seems the real utility of viewing the city as an experiment hinges entirely on whether we adopt a self-aware, historically nuanced approach. Or if we just continue with a more uncritical adoption of the term as a convenient trope. The source material we’ve discussed has certainly highlighted that the politics and history wrapped up in urban change are far more complex than the current language sometimes lets on
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and we have to keep interrogating what these experiments truly signify, not just for the systems, but for the people living inside them.
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