New Advances in Evaluating Urban Experimentation

Abstract

Urban experimentation has emerged as a potential way forward in otherwise intractable problems, particularly sustainability and climate change. Be it as a stepping stone towards desirable socio-technical trajectories or as the concrete embodiment of utopian futures, urban experiments are more than traditional projects. Despite these inflated promises, it is unclear how to evaluate experimentation and appraise its outcomes. Without appropriate evaluation, it is hard to assess initiatives’ success or effectiveness and capture insights and learnings, e.g., to refine the design and conduct experiments