Can low carbon city experiments transform the development regime

Sustainability, 2021

Sustainable urban (planning) experiments play a crucial role in transitions and are tangible ways to contribute to innovation and change in the long run. This paper discusses how urban experiments contribute to sustainability transitions by explicitly looking at an urban experiment’s capability to influence the regime level. The consequences of spatial inertia and political actors’ involvement are two understudied aspects concerning urban experiments. The paper aims to introduce these two understudied aspects and suggests further research on both in current urban experimentation practices. First, the paper suggests spatial embeddedness as a relevant explanatory factor. Experiments that alter spatial structures or realize physical interventions on a neighborhood scale can anchor innovations in space. In doing so, they increase their sustainability in the long run. Secondly, the article contributes to the literature on institutions and politics in urban experiments. The article uses a...

Urban Planning, 2021

Cities must change rapidly to address a range of sustainability challenges. While urban experimentation has prospered as a framework for innovation, it has struggled to stimulate broader transformation. We offer a novel contribution to this debate by focusing on what municipalities learn from experimentation and how this drives organisational change. The practicalities of how municipalities learn and change has received relatively little attention, despite the recognised importance of learning within the literature on urban experiments and the central role of municipalities in enabling urban transformation. We address this research gap, drawing on four years of in-depth research coproduced with European municipal project coordinators responsible for designing and implementing the largest urban research and innovation projects ever undertaken. This cohort of professionals plays a critical role in urban experimentation and transformation, funnelling billions of Euros into trials of ne...

Urbanization and Development, 2010

By many estimates, the world has just crossed the point where more than half the world's population is urban, a trend driven by rapid urbanization in developing countries. Urban centres offer economies of scale in terms of productive enterprise and public investment. Cities are social melting pots, centres of innovation and drivers of social change. However, cities are also marked by social differentiation, poverty, conflict and environmental degradation. These are all issues that not only matter to cities but also lie at the heart of development. As such the time is right to consider afresh the relationship between cities and development. This paper introduces a significant new collection of multidisciplinary papers focused on urbanization and its implications for development. It raises four questions: (i) What is so special about the urban context? (ii) Why is urbanization and urban growth important to development at the present conjuncture? (iii) What are the strengths and limitations of our current state of knowledge about urbanization and development from the policy perspective and finally, (iv) how can a multidisciplinary perspective on the urban context add value to development research and policy?

Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 2019

In the light of increasing urban challenges, municipalities are developing and advancing new forms of governing. One such example is 'urban experimentation', a process where city-based innovation processes are initiated to test solutions thatif deemed successfulare intended to be scaled up with the ambition to leverage a broader urban sustainability transition. Research on experimental governance has shown that municipalities can play various roles in these processes, including the role as enabler. The article contributes to the literature on the roles of public actors in urban experimentation on sustainability challenges by advancing understanding of the less studied 'enabler' role. We probe the politics of enabling by focusing on the policy instruments employed by municipalities. Our aim is to provide deeper insights into the everyday work of urban administrations when they act in the 'enabler' role. One particular approach of urban experimentation is Urban Living Labs (ULL), and this paper analyses ULL that address sustainability challenges. Along the four dimensions of nodality, authority, treasury, and organisation, we identify the politics of enabling in four ULL examples from Sweden and the Netherlands.

Sustainability

The upscaling of innovations from urban experiments is often assumed to be relatively easy, as if they can simply be ‘rolled out’. In practice, however, upscaling is usually constrained by a range of factors in the wider context of the innovation, typically a context of interconnected and ‘obdurate’ urban socio-technical networks and institutions. Innovation studies have used the notion of upscaling from experiments most explicitly in studies of transitions, especially of strategic niche management (SNM) and transition management (TM). However, these studies have focused more on niche internal dynamics and future visions, respectively, and much less on constraints in the present socio-institutional context. This paper offers a conceptual contribution on ‘constraints on upscaling’, elaborating on how upscaling can be more effective when constraints on upscaling are first identified in retrospective systems analysis, and then anticipated in the design of urban experiments. Our focus i...

Sustainable development at a global and local scale heavily depends upon the pathways taken by cities in the near future. Within scientific research, this frequently identified " urban challenge " has been recognized and addressed increasingly in urban studies, as well as in transformation studies. However, while both fields clearly overlap and effectively complement each other in this regard, the respective epistemic communities have largely remained separate so far. Therefore, this paper elaborates on the core concepts and approaches that dominate the emerging scientific debate on the role of cities in sustainability transitions. Based on a methodic literature review, it delineates the progressive convergence of the diverse disciplines involved over four major research perspectives. It equally derives key conclusions for future research and policy, highlighting the urgent need to connect the four fields identified, to link socio-technical and social-ecological system (SES) perspectives, to conceive of holistic innovations for developing new planning approaches, and to fully embrace transdisciplinarity by practicing science in society.

2013

This paper analyses the role of multi-level governance in the development and potential long-term impact of individual European Capital of Culture (ECOC) projects. By introducing the relationship between regional and national development plans and the ECOC, the study reveals why the general guidelines of the ECOC programme are interpreted in dissimilar ways. It illustrates how they are differently adopted not only at European and local local, but also in response to national and regional potentials and preferences. The paper draws on research carried out about two cases; the Pécs 2010 (Hungary) and the Turku 2011 (Finland) ECOC projects.

Sustainability, 2018

City-regions as sites of sustainability transitions have remained under-explored so far. With our comparative analysis of five diverse European city-regions, we offer new insights on contemporary sustainability transitions at the urban level. In a similar vein, the pre-development and the takeoff phase of sustainability transitions have been studied in depth while the acceleration phase remains a research gap. We address this research gap by exploring how transitions can move beyond the seeding of alternative experiments and the activation of civil society initiatives. This raises the question of what commonalities and differences can be found between urban sustainability transitions. In our explorative study, we employ a newly developed framework of the acceleration mechanisms of sustainability transitions. We offer new insights on the multi-phase model of sustainability transitions. Our findings illustrate that there are no clear demarcations between the phases of transitions. From the perspective of city-regions, we rather found dynamics of acceleration, deceleration, and stagnation to unfold in parallel. We observed several transitions-transitions towards both sustainability and un-sustainability-to co-evolve. This suggests that the politics of persistence-the inertia and path dependencies of un-sustainability-should be considered in the study of urban sustainability transitions.