In this guest post, Dr Georgiana Varna (Newcastle University, United Kingdom), Dr Michael Crilly (Northumbria University, United Kingdom), and Dr Karina Landman (University of Pretoria, South Africa) present their project on “Co-producing alternative urban futures through experimental urbanism” funded by a USF Seminar Series Awards grant. Stay tuned for the upcoming events.
We are delighted to have been awarded an Urban Studies Foundation Seminar Series Awards grant for holding three in-person events in Newcastle upon Tyne, Brussels, and Pretoria, to explore new experimental, creative and innovative practices of creating more liveable, sustainable, and fair cities across the world.
Our initial symposium was held in Newcastle upon Tyne in the north-east of England, over two days on the 15th and 16th of September 2025 and deliberately hosted in two experimental local buildings linked to separate partnership organisations. The first was Newcastle Contemporary Art, a community interest company formed post-COVID-19 by creative volunteers to take the responsibility from the local municipality of running a city centre art gallery. The second day was hosted by Newcastle’s “urban room”, the Farrell Centre. which operates as the public outreach part of Newcastle’s University School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape.
Our main goal for the event was to create the opportunity and the space for a diverse mix of academics from various stages in their careers, with a similar variety of practitioners from different contexts, all operating in the area of “experimental urbanism” to come together and debate contemporary pressing urban issues.
We use this phrase -“experimental urbanism” – as a catch-all definition to cover a variety of different interventions in urban environments, that all share the characteristics of experimentation: having newness or novelty, being collaborative or co-produced between multiple urban stakeholders and finally quite frequently not guaranteed to success, but in a positive manner allowing organisations to learn from their mistakes and come up with out of the box, innovative solutions to wicked problems.
In practice, the scope of projects presented and shared within the symposium brought together case studies looking at a mix of substantive interventions in the urban realm, including examples of guerrilla gardening, community-led street play initiatives, yarnbombing, demonstration or prototype architectural constructions, graffiti and street art, pop-up events and cultural activities. However, the scope of the projects also brought to light several policy experiments operating within local municipalities, non-standard financial models for different forms of social enterprises, young activists dealing with the regularisation of squatting, and even the use of games and simulations for experimentation with options and ideas.
While the scope of the contributors spanned a mix of urban academic disciplines, such as architecture, planning, landscape, sociology, surveying, ethnography, and geography, there was no practical distinction between researchers, policymakers, community representatives and practitioners as the attendees engaged in a vibrant debate, sharing their mixed experiences and project lessons.
They came from over 20 different countries and from over 6 continents: Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Finland, India, Indonesia, Italy, Israel, Macedonia, New Zealand, Peru, Senegal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK and the USA. There was a good mix of undergraduate, master’s and PhD students, as well as early career researchers and established academics. In addition, we had an exciting range of presentations of local experimental urban projects from across the globe.
The overall result was a captivating range of projects from incipient, prototype ideas to more established living labs and city-wide experimentation projects, such as the Summer Streets Stockholm initiative, presented by our keynote speaker Prof Andrew Karvonen from Lund University, Sweden. Other presentations and workshops included some high impact projects as for example, creating local community hubs for youth groups in Shanghai, innovative practices of appropriation of abandoned buildings in Rome and a number of other Italian cities, co-produced community led transformation of vacant spaces in Bandung, Indonesia, a variety of pocket parks and play streets from the UK, Scandinavia and reclaiming streets examples in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
There were pilot and experimental construction projects at the micro-scale of D.I.Y. and lo-fi reuse, to those at the macro scale looking at the circular economy, through to large-scale property assets such as military bases, to post-industrial neighbourhood strategies. Social business enterprises and experiments explored pioneering electric vehicle ecosystems in West Africa, adventure playgrounds in New Zealand, guerrilla urban farms in Sweden, community data training initiatives for energy justice in Cape Town, lived urban experiences of 65 years and older in Tasmania, as well as agroecological practices in the Peruvian Amazon. Throughout, one repeating theme was the importance of “learning by doing” where we collaboratively explored questions such as how to implement experimental urban projects into existing rigid planning and regulatory systems and how we can maximise our societal impact as researchers, beyond academia, moving from a detached theoretician role to engaged experimentalist.
We collectively explored and questioned the point, purpose and characteristics of “experimental urbanism”. While there were many ways to classify and organise the different types of experimental projects from scale, location, design or urban form, there were clear procedural steps that many of the presenters followed in their projects from concept / inception to scoping / benchmarking and learning from similar projects prior to delivery and post competition evaluation.
It was clear that whether through a design, community-led or quasi-scientific data-based type of urban experiment, having a clear intention supported by a project champion in whatever form, from an interested and invested local individual through to social interest organisations, was a strong starting point. Through project delivery, having a willingness to trial and test different interventions required embracing risk and possible failure as part of the process. Finally, having a growing community of stakeholders interested in and willing to share their own practical lessons indicated the value in establishing a network for knowledge exchange.
The following symposia are planned for 15th and 16th of January in Brussels, Belgium, and 15th and 16th of April in Pretoria, South Africa and 15th of June, online, where we will strengthen and grow this network in person and virtually and collect more examples of exciting, innovative, collaborative experiments in other cities and geographical locations across the world. Our main outputs we are aiming to deliver will be a book, a Special Issue for the Urban Studies Journal, a digital archive of international examples of urban experiments hosted on our new website www.experimentalurbanism.org and the creation of a global network of researchers and practitioners that will exchange ideas and learn from each other.