Conference Agenda

Intermediaries act in the in-between world between the built-up of new and the break-down of old societal configurations to facilitate change and reconcile opposing world views. While there is a broad literature on experimentation to foster urban sustainability transitions, there is limited understanding of intermediaries acting as facilitators and translators in urban experimentation. By portraying intermediary roles within both niches and regimes, this empirical contribution seeks to elucidate and critically reflect on their role in urban experimentation. This serves to explore the politics and underlying normative assumptions, which shape and are revealed by experimentation. The question arises if experimentation does create spaces to mediate between competing political priorities and build consensus, or reproduces power struggles and dominant policy rationales.

The qualitative case study provides an empirical exploration of niche and regime intermediaries in local experimentation by analysing the transdisciplinary-transformative research project [Name of the project removed for anonymous review process]. The real-world laboratory created a space for experimentation with different forms of intermediation to develop new transformative governance approaches. The roles adopted by niche and regime intermediaries show the importance of combining change from below with change from above. Niche intermediaries acted more as visionaries, knowledge brokers and advocates of change, seeking to contribute to both reconfiguration and the scaling of experiments through knowledge transfer. By contrast, regime intermediaries have an ambivalent nature of acting within-and-beyond the regime. They acted more as guides and facilitators, creating a shared institutional infrastructure and coordinating local-level activities. Boundary concepts like co-creation were important to align different logics of action.

While the findings showed an enabling function of municipalities for experimentation and transformative change, they also exposed the power asymmetries between regime intermediaries and niche actors arising from expertise and process knowledge. Moreover, regime intermediaries relied on dynamic governance configurations even though they had an official mandate to promote transformative change. They lacked integration in strategic political priorities and therefore operated outside and in parallel to overarching policy or planning processes. The findings further reveal the challenge for experimentation to transform projectified urban governance settings instead of reproducing them. This matters for intermediaries because they require long-term stability and financial support in order to shape transitions effectively.

Urban experimentation promises to solve two problems at the same time: Producing urban laboratories for demonstrating imagined future arrangements of materiality and meaning (Engels et al. 2019) and shaping these places to lend credibility to the futures enacted within them (Gieryn 2006). Such experiments entail major social, material, and temporal reorderings under the mandate of creating scalable models. According to the linear logic of experimentation, if proven successful, these models will be scaled in space, time and structural dimensions (Sengers et al. 2021). Assuming technological and infrastructural changes could scale in synchronized ways with social routines and practices, this logic foregrounds a solutionist approach that falls short of accounting for local and deviating transformation pathways (Pfotenhauer et al. 2021). In our analysis, we explore two pilot experiments in Munich and Barcelona, in which policy makers and researchers set up shared mobility spaces together with the residents in two respective neighborhoods as explicitly scalable models for their city and beyond. We address four tensions resulting from the specific chronopolitics (Felt 2016) embedded within the process of establishing scalable experiments: projectification, incongruency of time frames, socio-material persistence, and acceleration. Our analysis examines how the shared mobility spaces as initially limited measures for a few years, created a rigid temporal structure linked to funding periods and legislative cycles that were inscribed in the experimental setup. The project-like nature created pressure to get started and succeed in time to demonstrate scalable models, despite the uncertainty about the long-term viability of the emerging infrastructures. Both projects’ speeds stood in contrast to the already asynchronous rhythms and routines of society that were largely unaffected by the short-term interventions, destabilizing socio-material orders of the neighborhoods and causing significant initial protest. Only through iterative participation activities, inducing a long-term learning process for all involved actors, the resistance turned into majority support for the local transformations. In both cases, it was the citizens’ initiatives that maintained the shared mobility spaces beyond the project periods. In the following years, the initial scaling intentions of both models have not materialized. Instead, scaling beyond the pilot interventions was only viable through varying the nature of the interventions to account for diverse actors and asynchronous processes that stabilized the transformation pathways. The paper highlights the importance of considering the locally embedded temporal politics of scalable urban interventions and the need for a more holistic, inclusive, and power-sensitive approach for responsible transformation governance.

Cities need to take swift action to deal with the impacts of extreme climate events. The co-production of positive visions offers the potential to not only imagine but also intervene in guiding change towards more desirable urban futures. While participatory visioning continues to be used as a tool for urban planning, there needs to be a way of comparing and evaluating future visions so that they can inform decision-making. Traditional tools for comparison tend to favor quantitative modeling, which is limited in its ability to capture nuances or normative elements of visions. In this paper, we offer a qualitative method to assess the resilience, equity, and sustainability of future urban visions and demonstrate its use by applying it to 11 visions from Phoenix, AZ. The visions were co-produced at two different governance scales: five visions were created at the village (or borough) scale, and six visions were created at the regional (or metropolitan) scale. Our analysis reveals different emphases in the mechanisms present in the visions to advance resilience, sustainability, and equity. In particular, we note that regional future visions align with a green sustainability agenda, whereas village visions focus on social issues and emphasize equity-driven approaches. The visions have implications for future trajectories, and the priorities that manifest at the two scales speak of the political nature of visioning and the need to explore how these processes may interact in complementary, synergistic, or antagonistic ways.

Unless urban experimentation initiatives are embedded in local government processes from the very beginning, their effects often remain locally isolated and short-lived. How can this be changed? Together with local partners, the “Transformative Urban Coalitions” action-research project has facilitated the establishment of participatory multi-actor Urban Labs (UL) in five cities in Mexico (León and Naucalpan), Brazil (Recife and Teresina) and Argentina (Villa 20 in Buenos Aires) since 2021. While the ULs also develop local catalyst projects to showcase the potential of urban sustainability innovations, their focus is on establishing a new and complementary mode of collaborative urban governance. Using this governance mode, existing structural inequalities, local developmental priorities, and climate change mitigation and adaptation necessities should be dealt with in a more integrated way. Midway through the project (which runs until 2026), the ULs have now generated some interest by other cities as well as national and international actors. However, despite this welcome interest, a purely linear idea of “scaling” this governance approach seems inappropriate. One of the reasons is that – unlike many other types of ULs which focus on technical and material innovations – these Urban Governance Labs more directly address questions of politics, power, and inequality. Acknowledging that political changes are more difficult and more complex than technical changes, we are looking for an alternative to the concept of “scaling” and try to develop a less technical and more politically aware understanding for inspiring other actors to learn from and experiment with this approach. Rather than assuming a linear process, the idea is to proceed in ways that systematically exploit temporal and structural windows of opportunity in a given context. This approach is strategic and opportunistic at the same time which is why instead of “scaling” it could be referred to as “strategic diffusion” or “strategic scattering”. Some of the key features of this approach are that it is politically savvy, locally led, network driven, and highly adaptive. The paper will present this approach in more conceptual detail and will provide empirical illustrations from the five cities as input for a critical discussion.

Images and aesthetic representation tell powerful stories about the ways international actors see themselves and want to be seen by their peers. In the case of climate change, we often see dystopian images of the threats and urgency facing our global community. However, when we look to the governance documents, particularly climate plans offered by cities globally, we see a radically different and almost hopeful narrative presented through stories and images. How do cities see the future of climate change and communicate those narratives to their residents and the global community at large? To understand the narratives cities construct about their own futurity in the face of climate, I engage in two interpretive content analysis methods -- patterning and narrative text analysis —to analyze the images and narratives presented by C40 member cities (n=95) through their Climate Action Plans (CAPs). I discuss the implications of how cities construct climate futures, considering issues of who is included (and excluded) through these narratives, how these narratives align or diverge from reality, and how these narratives and images of futurity impact global city engagement on climate governance around issues including environmental justice, equity, and urgency.