Experimental City

James Evans is a Professor of Geography at the School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester, UK.Andrew Karvonen is Assistant Professor in Urban and Regional Studies at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.Rob Raven is Professor of Institutions and Transitions at Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

"If the much talked about politics of green transformations during the post-2009 era is to be more than another fad, it will have to find traction in the world’s cities where the majority of the population now lives. This book convincingly argues that this is starting to happen as ‘urban experiments’ mushroom across the global regions of the world. This first provocative review of the evolutionary potential of these actually existing processes of change starts off in Chapter 2 with a remarkably useful definition of ‘urban experimentation’ that is then explored by people from many different disciplines and perspectives. The analyses emerging from this book raise the possibility that ‘urban experimentation’ may well be the emergent mode of governance that replaces both bureaucratic managerialism and the business-led public-private partnerships that underpinned neo-liberal corporatism and splintered urbanism. Entrepreneurs, innovators and knowledge networks become the new players in a world where cities become laboratories for the future." Professor Mark Swelling, Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Development in the School of Public Leadership, Stellenbosch University, South Africa."Students, researchers and practioners will find inspiration in this text from the extremely clear and succinct theorisations in section one, the illustrative case studies in section two and the insightful reflections in section three. While undoubtedly the collection reveals conceptual and empirical gaps in the field, this in itself is also productive in suggesting new directions for research and understanding." – Robert Shaw, Newcastle University, UK

• 1. The experimental city: new modes and prospects of urban transformationPART I: LOGICS OF EXPERIMENTATION2. Experiments in the city: unpacking notions of experimentation for sustainability3. Cities, experiments, and the logics of the knowledge economy4. The urban laboratory and emerging sites of urban experimentation5. Virtual city experimentation: a critical role for design visioning6. The boundaries of experimentation in sustainable urbanism7. Cabin ecologies: the technoscience of integrated urban infrastructurePART II: EXPERIMENTING IN CITIES8. Green enclaves, neoliberalism and the constitution of the experimental city in Santiago de Chile9. Urban mobility experiments in India and Thailand10. Urban science networks and local economy: the case of Newcastle upon Tyne11. Grassroots experimentation: alternative learning and innovation in the Prinzessinnengarten, Berlin12. Living labs: users, citizens and sustainable urban transitionsPART III: EXPERIMENTAL CITIES 13. Turning over a new leaf: sustainability and urban experimentation in Seoul14. Frankenstein cities: (de)composed urbanism and experimental eco-cities15. Experimental afterlives: making and unmaking developmental laboratories in Ghana 16. The glorious failure of the experimental city: cautionary tales from Arcosanti and Masdar17. Post carbon cities: distributed and decentralized and demodernized?