Beyond consensus: politicizing urban experimental planning

Abstract

In the face of multiple crises municipalities are confronted with complex transformations that challenge established modes of planning. In the absence of adaptive, integrative, and reflexive tools, they turn towards communicative and experimental formats. Rather than representing a paradigmatic shift, these formats function as provisional responses to institutional and epistemic gaps. While they are often associated with collaborative learning, innovation, and open-ended knowledge production, their proliferation can also be understood as symptomatic of the limited capacity of conventional, technocratic planning approaches to address contemporary urban challenges. Despite the innovative character and reported success of such experiments, empirical scholarship indicates that these formats are susceptible to reproducing post-political conditions: they can depoliticize conflicts, privilege expert knowledge over that of citizens, and stabilize existing power relations, thereby reinforcing dominant social orders. In this Perspective we draw on Jacques Rancière’s theoretical thoughts to conceptualize urban experiments as sites where the Distribution of the Sensible and thus the prevailing social order can be either stabilized or disrupted. We show that experiments are inherently ambivalent: they can conceal contestation and uphold existing agendas, yet they can also activate processes of political subjectivation and render alternative urban imaginaries visible. We argue that realizing this potential requires recognizing citizens as political subjects, allowing for open-ended conflicts, avoiding pre-defined outcomes, and providing resources for sustained engagement. Transforming urban experiments into arenas for genuine democratic negotiation entails a reconfiguration of project logics, participatory arrangements, and institutional support structures to explicit embrace contestation. Experimental planning should establish conditions for antagonistic debate in urban transformation. Dissent and conflict should be enabled instead of prevented in instruments like real-world laboratories. To do so, predetermined agendas and results should be avoided. Also, all participants, especially unheard or marginalized voices, should be recognized as political subjects. Questions concerning the design, governance and participation of urban experiments should be reviewed carefully.