Urban experimentation has proliferated in recent years as a response to sustainability challenges and renewed pressures on urban governance. In many European cities, diverse and rapidly changing experimental forms (e.g. urban living laboratories, pilots, trials, experimental districts) are becoming commonplace, addressing ambitious goals for smartness, circularity, and liveability. Academically, there is a growing concern for moving beyond the focus on individual experiments and the insistence on upscaling their primary transformation mechanism. However, the phenomena of ‘projectification’ – whereby project-based forms of organising have become ubiquitous, shaping expectations about experimentation – is increasingly perceived as a barrier. Nevertheless, how specifically experimentation and projectification intersect remains unclear. Our theoretical perspective examines how the widespread tendency towards projectification shapes urban experimentation and the potential implications for urban transformations. It problematises the current wave of experimentation and how it contributes to the projectification of urban change processes. We present three steps to redress this issue and indicate directions for future research.

Recent times have seen the rediscovery and adaptation of mission-oriented innovation policies (MIPs) for driving transformative change. While such policies seek to mobilise and align stakeholders, little is known about how missions feature in policy coordination processes. We argue that to facilitate the still troublesome operationalisation of MIPs, it is essential to understand missions as ‘boundary objects’ that have some shared meanings among the participants they convene, yet are open enough to be interpreted differently by distinct actors gathering in four interconnected policy arenas—i.e. a strategic, programmatic, implementation, and performance arena. By studying the European Commission’s Horizon Europe missions, we unravel how missions as boundary objects enable and disable the coordination of heterogeneous communities. The resulting analytical perspective highlights three key mechanisms for coordinating mission meanings across communities and arenas: convergence–divergence, passage, and reflexive learning. We conclude with research avenues for studying missions as boundary objects for facilitating concerted action.

Urban experimentation with sustainability has been gaining prominence in policy and academic discourses about urban transformations, spurring the creation of urban living laboratories and transition arenas. However, the academic literature has only begun examining why experimentation flourishes in particular cities, and why it conforms to place-specific styles. Meanwhile, the strategic niche management (SNM) tradition has extensively explored how protective spaces for experimentation emerge but has dealt only tangentially with why this happens in particular places. In this paper, we develop an approach for unpacking the formation of favourable environments for experimentation in specific places. We adopt an abductive research design to create a dialogue between distinct theoretical positions and one in-depth case study. Our case examines the formation of the Bristol energy scene, which hosts a variety of experimental initiatives concerning civic energy alternatives. Based on our findings, we refine the understanding of the processes shaping this experimental setting. There is value in characterising the ‘genealogy’ of experimental spaces and acknowledging their antecedents, path-dependencies and place-specificities. Efforts to foster urban transformation demand nuanced accounts of how places become experimental because they are not static backgrounds for experimentation.

Growing urban populations, climate change, drought, and ageing infrastructures increase pressure on water delivery. This prompts the search for innovations, with incumbents increasingly attempting to enable and steer ‘experimental’ approaches. Historically, incumbents were assumed to be largely resistant to potentially disruptive innovations. However, their strategic orientations may be changing due to the urgency of sustainability challenges leading to increased experimentation. This change raises a question about how incumbents influence experiments in particular directions while neglecting or discouraging others. This research centers on the ‘La Kretz Innovation Campus’, and three experiments therein, partly established by the incumbent water utility in Los Angeles. It explores how creating an internal ‘protective space’ for experimentation generates struggles over institutional changes necessary for such experiments to thrive. Conceptualizing ‘incumbent-enabled experimentation’ as a set of practices nested within novel institutional, organizational, and political arrangements reveals the internal tensions incumbents face when seeking more sustainable directions.

BIODIESEL FROM MICROALGAE: THE EFFECT OF FUEL PROPERTIES ON POLLUTANT EMISSIONS