Conditioning experimentation: The struggle for place-based discretion in shaping urban infrastructures

Abstract

Re-shaping infrastructure systems and social practices within urban contexts has been promoted as a critical way to address a range of contemporary economic, environmental and social challenges. Though there are many attempts to re-imagine more sustainable urban contexts the challenge remains how to achieve such change. In this context, urban experiments have emerged as a way to stage purposive infrastructure interventions and learn what works in practice. The paper integrates literatures on urban governance and urban socio-technical experiments to extend analytical understanding of urban experimentation. Through a case study of ‘sustainable transport’ experimentation in Greater Manchester, we argue that place-based priorities that inform action on sustainable urban futures are conditioned by non-place-based, particularly national, interests. Our paper makes two key contributions. First, we illustrate how the (narrow) national conditioning of place-based priorities translates in to experimentation in episodic ways that are highly contextual. We detail how national priorities, stipulations and funding are mediated and translated at the urban scale where they set conditions for the range of interventions that are feasible in a particular context. The interventions that follow are then materially embedded in place through experimentation with processes of governing and constituting capacity. Second, we argue that the learning generated through these processes of experimentation is only weakly communicated back to conditioning institutions. The result is that there is strong conditioning of experimentation but weak experimentation with conditions. The paper illustrates how the potential of experimentation is conditioned and thus it brings to the fore the need to understand experimentation politically.

Climate changed urban futures: environmental politics in the anthropocene city

“…(Karvonen 2018; see also Bulkeley 2015Bulkeley , 2019. For Hodson et al (2018) experimentation serves as a means for 'successfully materially embedding 'new' sustainable infrastructure interventions in a particular place' that 'requires configuring place-based interests, infrastructural technologies and forms of knowledge in ways which aren't always clear a priori' (Hodson et al 2018(Hodson et al , p. 1481. Rather than being a form of intervention that is designed to test and scale new innovations, experimentation here is regarded as a disposition towards the city, a shift necessitated by seeking to govern in a context where what constitutes urban improvement is indeterminate and contested (Edwards and Bulkeley 2018).…”

Futurizing politics and the sustainability of real-world experiments: what role for innovation and exnovation in the German energy transition?

“…Furthermore, an important part of the sustainability literature conceptualizes processes toward sustainability as based on experimental approaches (among others, see Bulkeley et al 2016;Hodson et al 2018). In the context here we use the notion of real-world experiments (Gross et al 2003;Gross and Hoffmann-Riem 2005;van de Poel et al 2017) since it has been established in many fields ranging from the clean-up of contaminated sites (Bleicher and Gross 2016), urban planning (Reinermann and Behr 2017), genetically modified crops (Levidow and Carr 2007), geo-engineering (Factor 2015), the gradual implementation of smart grids systems (Lösch and Schneider 2017) and waste management (Krohn 2007) to sustainability science (Caniglia et al 2017), ecological restoration (Gross and Hoffmann-Riem 2005) and geothermal energy operations (Gross 2016).…”

Funding, financing and governing urban infrastructures

“…Key is finding ways more widely to distribute in social and spatial terms the shared outputs of infrastructure operation rather than allowing them to be blocked, enclosed or corralled for the benefits of financial actors and interests (O'Neill, 2019). Whether, how, where and when such changes would result in more genuinely alternative, collective and sustainable solutions require further experiment, study and evaluation internationally (Fainstein, 2016;Hall et al, 2019;Hodson et al, 2018;Pike et al, 2019).…”