10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17384
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2038-3460
17384
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en
Claudia Mendes
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
James Evans, Andrew Karvonen and Rob Raven (eds.), The Experimental City, Routledge, 2016
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
8
Book Reviews
2018-01-29
2023-06-25
2018-01-29
2023-08-24
226-229
TS
Claudia Mendes
2017
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17384
226
Technical University of Munich
2038-3460
2
en
229
James Evans, Andrew Karvonen and Rob Raven (eds.), The Experimental City, Routledge, 2016
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17384/16244
8
226                                                          Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

   James Evans, Andrew Karvonen and Rob Raven (eds.)
The Experimental City, London, Routledge, 2016, pp. 280

Claudia Mendes and Pim Peters Technical University of Munich

     Evans, Karvonen and Raven’s The Experimental City is a timely con-
tribution to a growing body of literature on urban experiments – for oth-
er recent literature see (Castán Broto and Bulkeley 2013; Karvonen and
van Heur 2014; Laurent and Tironi 2015). Yet, the current edited volume
is distinctive in that it brings together contributions from a variety of dis-
ciplines such as transition studies, urban studies and STS. This combina-
tion is not always easy or without frictions, but provides the reader with a
rich variety of conceptual sensibilities and insights. Urban experimenta-
tion on the one hand appears as holding a promise for realizing a more
sustainable organization of urban life and overcoming resistance to
change, on the other hand, it is also presented as ambivalent and highly
political activity requiring careful examination and continuous critical
engagement.
     With a strong empirical focus, the volume takes the reader on a jour-
ney through case studies from regions as diverse as Ghana, Chile, Abu
Dhabi, Korea and the UK, to name just a few, thereby showing the preva-
lence of urban experiments but also the diversity of phenomena taken
into account. Some of the volumes stand out chapters for an STS audi-
ence include a critical analysis of “cabin ecologies” developed to protect
humans in hostile environments (such as space) and a their links to cur-
rently emerging “integrated urban infrastructures” such as the Apple
campus in Cupertino (Marvin and Hodson), an interrogation of the limits
to experimentation when it becomes incorporated as marketable differen-
tiator by the property development industry (Rapoport), a critical analysis
of the planning, assembling and inhabitation of experiments in “green
living” in Santiago de Chile (Sanzana Calvet and Castán Broto), an eth-
nographic account tracing the modernist vision of a resettlement experi-
ment and its afterlife in local discourse and imaginaries in rural Ghana
(Yarrow) and the speculative but thought-provoking sketch of a potential
post-carbon city (Pincetl).
     The presented case studies range from bottom-up to top-down initia-
tives, highly controlled environments to in vivo settings, projects branded
as experimental and practices spontaneously emerging as such, thereby
showcasing different conceptual and empirical enactments of the main
issue at stake: the experiment and its relationship to the city. A recurring
feature throughout the volume however, is an understanding of the ex-
periment as an arrangement for exploring working relations in order to
“prompt genuine change” (p. 1) – to put it in the words of the volume
editors – towards more sustainable ways of organizing collective urban
life. This is a clear departure from the “classical” understanding of the
Book Review                                                              227
Chicago School, which, as argued by Gieryn (2006) understood the urban
laboratory as a “restricting and controlling environment, whose place-
lessness enables generalizations to ‘anywhere’” (Gieryn 2006, p. 7). By
contrast, most contributors to the current volume do not seek to con-
struct such “placeless places”. Experimentation here appears as a broad
range of different activities that share the capacity to engender reimagini-
ation, redescription and rematerialization of existing urban realities with
regard to sustainable development. Throughout the chapters one may
however identify different conceptual and empirical takes on this.
     One distinct understanding of this city/experiment relationship is ex-
emplified by Ch. 5. Here, cities appear conceptually as “complex adap-
tive systems with significant embedded dependencies built-in over the
years of their construction” (p. 62). This approach, influenced by transi-
tion studies, foregrounds how the functioning, or failure of integrated in-
frastructures crucially shapes the functioning of human and nonhuman
urban life and implies a notion of the experiment as virtual but indispen-
sable prerequisite for successful change. Seeing the city as a set of layered
and interconnected socio-technical systems leads Ryan et al. to conclude
that “trying to re-engineer the city one sub-system at a time is bound to
fail because new, often unpredicted, problems are likely to arise in anoth-
er sub-system” (pp. 63-64). Therefore, they argue, a transition to a “resili-
ent non-carbonaceous city” can only be realized through “a (rapid) tran-
sition from one set of socio-cultural technological-physical systems to an-
other set” (p. 64). Experimentation in their view then, is a virtual exercise
meant to test and build up these alternative subsystems and to prepare
the grounds for the proposed rapid transition.
     A second type of urban experimentation is explored in Chs. 14 and
16. Both analyse the case of Masdar, a so called “eco-city” planned from
scratch and currently under construction in the United Arabic Emirates.
Despite different foci, the authors share the observation that Masdar City
is rather a fragmented clean-tech testing site, where too many actors – of-
ten profit-driven – through too many experiments – mostly product in-
novation – fail to assemble the promised eco-city. By the actors involved
in Masdar’s development the city is thus not so much perceived as a
complex socio-technical system or itself the object and target of experi-
mentation, but rather as a tabula rasa, where technological experiments
can be staged and commercial solutions to sustainability issues demon-
strated. However, as such, so the authors argue, this disconnected type of
experimental platforms fails to induce sustainable urban development
and to generate knowledge on the deployment of clean technologies in
more complex and liveable urban contexts, that could lead to wider so-
cial transformations.
     A third way of relating experimentation to the city is suggested in Ch.
11. Jana Wendler presents an ethnography of a community garden in Ber-
lin as an alternative, emergent and bottom-up space for experimentation
228                                                         Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

with social organisation. In her account, experimentation is not at the
outset of a policy or company driven project, nor is it explicitly designed
as such. Instead, the grassroots community garden project develops over
time – or organically, as the author puts it – into an alternative urban
space, where different and unforeseen experiments can happen and indi-
vidual as well as community learning can occur. The complex spatial and
social entanglement of the community garden with the wider urban con-
text allows, according to Wendler, “to take up a distinct and valuable role
in processes of urban change” (p. 161) which is more open to diverse and
sometimes marginal actors. In this conception of “open, extended real-
world experiments” (p. 159), instead of virtually testing alternative fu-
tures or staging technological innovation on a tabula-rasa, experimenta-
tion is a highly situated and embodied activity, that “allows big issues to
become knowable in everyday mundane, small-scale practices through
the affective relations between body and material”, but does not serve as
a “replicable blueprint” (p. 160) for other cities.
    What these spot lights demonstrate is certainly the sheer diversity of
practices and projects that are being theorized as experimental cities or
urban laboratories. But they also show what Evans et al. point out in their
introduction; namely that “Experiments, understandings of experiments,
and the attendant future visions they entail, are not inherently positive
but carry politics just like any other development strategy” (p. 3). While
STS readers may find that not all approaches chosen in the book are be-
ing equally attentive to these politics of experimentation, the rather broad
and open minded approach to urban experiments adopted in The Exper-
imental City certainly succeeds in mapping out a huge field for future re-
search and conceptualisation, where a stronger involvement of STS
scholars can be of benefit.
    The relevance of STS engagement becomes especially clear in light of
the books wider context. As Maarten Hajer points out in the foreword we
are currently witnessing a “turn to experimental governance” (p. xviii),
not just among scholars but also in practice. However, and this should be
no surprise to an STS audience, scholarly publications like The Experi-
mental City do not merely describe this experimental turn but actively
contribute to it. Recent work of Hannah Knox provides a telling example
of such performative effects of social theory: Knox describes her ethno-
graphic encounter with Zeb, a British IT entrepreneur working on how
“digital technologies might provide solutions for climate change” (Knox
2017, 356). As Knox explains, Zeb’s own work is inspired by that of
Frank Geels (2002) and other transition scholars, some of which contrib-
uted to the current edited volume. Based on this encounter Knox argues,
that “new techniques of governance – the experiment, the unaccounted
for action, the re-description and re-imagination of already existing prac-
tices as the basis for future action are crucial for understanding how con-
temporary governmental actors are imagining and formulating infrastruc-
Book Review                                                                    229
tures of the future” (Knox 2017, 363). Such observations of performativi-
ty do not only affirm the relevance and timeliness of The Experimental
City, but also the importance of substantial STS engagement with the is-
sues it puts forward and the types of cities it enacts.

References
Castán Broto, V. and Bulkeley, H. (2013) A survey of urban climate change ex-
       periments in 100 cities, in “Global Environmental Change”, 23 (1), pp.
       92-102.
Geels, F.W. (2002) Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration pro-
       cesses: a multi-level perspective and a case-study, in “Research Policy”, 31
       (8–9), pp. 1257-1274.
Gieryn, T.F. (2006) City as Truth-Spot: Laboratories and Field-Sites in Urban
       Studies, in “Social Studies of Science” 36 (1), pp. 5-38.
Karvonen, A. and van Heur, B. (2014) Urban Laboratories: Experiments in Re-
      working Cities, in “International Journal of Urban and Regional Re-
      search”, 38 (2), pp. 379-392.
Knox, H. (2017) The Problem of Action: Infrastructure, planning and the infor-
      mational environment, in P. Harvey, C. B. Jensen, and A. Morita (eds.),
      Infrastructures and Social Complexity, a companion, New York,
      Routledge, pp. 352-365.
Laurent, B. and Tironi, M. (2015) A field test and its displacements. Accounting
       for an experimental mode of industrial innovation, in “CoDesign”, 11 (3-
       4), pp. 208–221.


                                       ***

   Jennifer Gabrys
Program Earth. Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a
Computational Planet, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press,
2016, pp. 368

Caspar Menkman Maynooth University

    Program Earth is about the becoming environmental of computation.
In this book Jennifer Gabrys attends to the (per)formative role that calcu-
lative and sensing technologies play as part of everyday and extraordinary
environments. These spatializing properties have previously been re-
marked on in other academic disciplines. For instance authors in com-
puter science (Weiser 1993), social science (Kitchin and Dodge 2011),
