Strategies for redressing projectification in urban experimentation: on portfolios and ecologies

Urban experimentation has proliferated in recent years as a response to sustainability challenges and renewed pressures on urban governance. A diverse and rapidly changing suite of experimental forms - urban living laboratories, pilots, trials, experimental districts - are becoming commonplace in many European cities, as they seek to meet ambitious goals for smartness, circularity, and liveability. Those involved in 'governing through experimentation' struggle to mobilise a multiplicity of initiatives and programmes with various thematic streams and organisational forms, and to meet the promise of providing systemic responses. Fragmentation, duplication and a lack of shared learning are common barriers to the supposed impacts of experimentation. As this paper shows, these issues which arised with the first wave of urban experimentation are better understood in the contexts of a wider phenomenon of projectification, whereby project-based forms of organising have become the default, across society. By exploring the nexus between experimentation and projectification, this paper examines whether and how pursuing urban experimentation furthers the projectification of society's response to wicked challenges, and what strategies may be used in order to harness the multiplicity of experimentation. It problematises the current wave of experimentation, and distinguishes two ideal-type strategies - portfolios and ecologies. These differ in terms of the role of manager, degree of directness, affordance to failure, control mechanisms, orchestrating mechanisms and reporting mechanisms; each privileges particular forms of experimentation, and therefore implicitly shapes what counts for learning, resource allocation and local embedding. By better situating the debate about fragmentation of experiments, and clarifying the implications of projectification, this paper contributes to a more nuanced, reflexive and hopefully transformative practice of urban experimentation.