Globally, urban experimentation has proliferated across many cities to address sustainability problems. Whilst experiments can serve different functions, including to test new technologies, enable learning, or diffuse best practices, there remains questions about how experiments ultimately generate sector-level transformative impacts beyond the individual projects. Limited systematic efforts have been put towards capturing how experimental lessons feed into policy processes. In this paper we ask how can we capture the sector-level impacts of urban experimentation while considering their place-based influences?
Rather than seeing place as a mere territorial ‘container’ for experiments, here we conceive place as a structure that is open and yet bounded, constituted through the interplay of multiple social and material elements. We build on a framework that has been tested in a large N-study of experiments across 100 cities. They emphasise the following place-based conditions: governance & stakeholder networks, policy visions and plans, localised learning processes, financial resources and funding structures, localised informal institutions, natural endowments and resources, and urban materiality. We complement this with an operationalisation of impacts in terms of how experiment generates new discourse, institution, resource, and relationships which may feed into sector-wide policy shifts. Employing a desktop approach, we develop a database that captures these place-based conditions and sectoral impacts across forty cases of water and energy experimentations across two Australian cities.
The database captures the diversity of urban experimentation approaches (in terms of degrees of novelty and types of intervention) while facilitating comparison across the two sectors. We could discern specific governance patterns, presence/absence of policy drivers, funding patterns, learning extents, and variable influences of informal institutions. Material conditions, such as resource problems and availability lands, appear as important determinants behind many experimentations. Evidence of sector-wide impacts can be systematically presented; however, it remains difficult to establish causal relationships between impact and experimentation.