Co-producing alternative urban futures through experimental urbanism

Dr Georgiana Varna, Dr Michael Crilly and Dr Karina Landman

Funding period: 1 September 2025 – 1 July 2026
Type of funding: Seminar Series

Partner organisations: Newcastle University, School of Architecture, Building and Planning, Newcastle upon Tyne (United Kingdom), Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne (United Kingdom), Vrije University Brussels, The Brussels Centre for Urban Studies (Belgium), and University of Pretoria, Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology (South Africa)

Events: Newcastle, United Kingdom (September 2025), Brussels, Belgium (January 2026) Pretoria, South Africa (April 2026) and online (June 2026)

Organisers: Dr Georgiana Varna (Newcastle University), Dr Michael Crilly (Northumbria University), and Dr Karina Landman (University of Pretoria)

Team members: Bas van Heur, Professor of Urban Studies, Head of the research unit Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research, director of the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies; Mark Oranje, Professor of Town and Regional Planning, University of Pretoria, Department of Engineering, Built Environment and Infor-mation Technology, Pretoria, South Africa; Sabine Knierbein, Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space and Associate Professor for Urban Culture and Public Space; and Dr Tihomir Viderman, Brandenburg University of Technology, Germany, Lead of AESOP (Association of European Schools of Planning) Sub-group Public Spaces and Urban Cultures and co-ordinator of the urban research experimental network UrbEx.

Contact: Dr Georgiana Varna

Abstract:

This seminar series is intended to bring together urban researchers, activists, and practitioners involved in experimental, collaborative, future-oriented projects focused on improving the urban public realm and urban public life. The primary focus is unravelling and understanding current urban practices that have emerged in recent years as alternatives to mainstream planning and urban governance processes, particularly in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. These can be together described as ‘experimental urbanism’, presented in the public and academic discourse through often overlapping and related terms such as temporary urbanism, ad-hoc urbanism, DiY urbanism, pop-up urbanism, tactical urbanism, or guerrilla urbanism. We seek to bring together in dialogue researchers, activists and practitioners involved in undertaking meaningful public realm projects that break with common planning and urban design practices, either in terms of experimental methods of place-making, innovative governance approaches to urban processes or radical creative spatial interventions. Regarding its underlying logics, experimentation uses a mode of knowledge generation based on reflexivity, which includes continuous reflection, assessment and readjustment; therefore, a feedback loop is generated, where an experiment is proposed and delivered, with data being collected and analysed, fed into urban policy and then leading to further experimental activities (Evans and Karvonen, 2014; Karvonen et. al., 2016).

We therefore advocate experimentation as the right approach to deal with wicked and complex societal and environmental problems, which defy established forms of problem-solving. The key purpose of this seminar series is to bring together collaborative urban experiments in an open and dynamic dialogue regarding stakeholder agency and impact on stronger community belonging and democratic engagement outcomes, with the aim of building more socially sustainable urban futures. Collectively urban experiments allow us to (a) avoid retrospective policy interventions and responses where projects are only supported where there is already substantive evidence for successful urban interventions; (b) have the explicit ability to learn from mistakes and sub-optimal interventions without critical risk; (c) building a resource base for more diverse responses to planning and managing urban futures. The substantive outcomes from the geographically diverse case studies from different scales, contexts and partnership organisations in the Global South and the developed North will bring a more diverse range of planning solutions for possible futures. More significantly, they will demonstrate and differentiate how ‘process innovation’ can result in a variety of physical and policy interventions beneficial for the needed expansion of urban and planning studies.

Project Website