ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the production and circulation of urban experiments through urban living laboratories, a mode of governing the city and type of experimentation that is growing in popularity. Urban living labs (ULLs) constitute a form of experimental governance, where urban stakeholders develop and test new technologies and ways of living to address the challenges of climate change and urban sustainability. The chapter outlines three dimensions of ULLs that are influencing urban politics, loosely organized around the themes of legitimacy, inclusivity and inequality associated with the devolution of urban problem solving to local scales. The rise of urban experimentation is related to a range of social, economic and environmental challenges facing cities. Considering the political aspects of urban experimentation leads inexorably to the question of how an experiment or set of experiments drives wider transformation. ULLs constitute bounded spaces that enable intentional collaborative experimentation by researchers, citizens, companies and local governments.
