Planning by experiment: the innovation potential of urban experimentation for planning practice

Abstract

By examining how urban experimentation fosters innovation in urban planning practices, this research contributes to the growing field of ‘urban planning by experiment’. It focuses on Tactical Urbanism (TU) as a form of city street experiments and analyzes its capacity to drive long-term change in municipal planning. Situated at the interface of planning theory, public sector innovation theory, transition studies, and transformative and transdisciplinary sustainability research - with a focus on sustainable urban mobility - this research engages with recent planning debates related to urban sustainability transitions and the need for a reorientation of planning practices. While experimental practices are proliferating in cities around the world and are often celebrated by practitioners and scholars alike for their transformative potential, empirical evidence is scarce of how and under what conditions these interventions impact and innovate planning in the long run. This research addresses this gap in two ways: First, it develops a conceptual framework that defines innovation in planning as change across three dimensions: thinking, doing, and organizing. It also identifies the conditions influencing the likelihood that such changes in planning occur, and novel approaches and outcomes from experiments are institutionalized. Second, the framework is applied and refined through a longitudinal case study of TU experimentation in Barcelona from 2013 to 2023. Barcelona was chosen as a case study because it has been using TU for over ten years. This long period of experimentation offers a rare chance to study whether and how experimental practices and their innovations evolve, become adopted, and institutionalized as well as their impact on planning practices. Methodologically, the research employs a reconstructed longitudinal case study design with a mixed-methods approach including document analyses, field observations, and ten semi-structured interviews with planners, politicians, academics, and civil society representatives. The findings reveal that, although urban experimentation creates valuable opportunities to test new approaches and ideas, its transformative impact on planning practice seems limited and depends on various contextual factors, including institutional, political, and cultural influences. By integrating conceptual development with empirical research, this study strengthens the theoretical-conceptual foundation of scholarship on ‘urban planning by experiment‘ and provides important empirical insights into how urban experiments (can) promote innovation in urban planning and support urban sustainability transitions, particularly in the domain of urban mobility